IN A WINTER CITY. Hi c By OUIDA, ^4--) AUTHOR OF 'puck,' ' SIGNA,' ' TRICOTRIN,' 'TWO LITTLB WOODEN SHOES,' ETC ^^EPV EDITION. Eon^on: CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY. TRfs^y im OUIDA'S NOVELS. Uniform Editiov, crown Svo, red cloth extra, 5». each, FOLLE FARINE. IDA LI A : A Romance. CHAN'DOS: A Novel. UNDER TWO FLAGS. TRICOTRIN. CECIL CASTLEMAIN'E'S GAGE. HELD IN BONDAGE. PASCAREL : Only a Story. PUCK : His Vicissitudes, Adventures, &c. A DOG OF FLANDERS. STRATHMORE. TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. SIGNA. IN A WINTER CITY. ARIADNE. CSATTO ic WINBVS, PICCADILLY, W. IN A WINTER CITY. CHAPTER I. Floralia was once a city of great fame. It stands upon an historical river. It is adorned with all that the Arts can assemble of beauty, of grace, and of majesty. Its chronicles blaze with heroical deeds and with the achievements of genius. Great men have been bred within its walls ; men so great that the world has never seen their like again. Floralia, in her liberties, in her citizens, in her pi^ets and painters and sculptors, once upon a B 2 IN A WINTER CITY. time had few rivals, perhaps, indeed, no equals, upon earth. By what strange irony of fate, by what smgular cynical caprice of accident, has this fairest of cities, with her time-honoured towers lifted to her radiant sides, become the universal hostehy of cosmopolitan fashion and of fashion- able idleness ? Sad vicissitudes of fallen fortunes ! — to such base uses do the greatest come. It is Belisarius turned croupier to a gaming- table ; it is Cassar selling cigars and news- papers; it is Apelles drawing for the ''Albums pour Eire ; " it is Pmdar rhyming the couplets for " Fleur de The ;" it is Praxiteles designing costumes for a Calico-ball ; it is Phidias form- ing the poses of a ballet ! Perhaps the mighty ghosts of mediaeval Flo- ralia do walk, sadly and ashamed, by midnight under the sliadow of its exquisite piles of marble and of stone. If they do, nobody sees them : the cigarette smoke is too thick. As for the modern inilers of Floralia, they have risen elastic and elated to the height of the situa- tion, and have done their best and uttermost to dc- IN A WINTER CITY. grade their city into due accordance with her pre- sent cu'cumstances, and have destro^^ed as much as they dared of her noble picturesqueness and ancient ways. They have tacked on to her ven« rable pahices and graceful towers, stucco man- sions and straight hideous streets, and staring walls covered with advertisements, and barren boulevards studded with toy trees that are cropped as soon as they presume to grow a leaf, and have striven all they know to fit her for her fortunes, as her inn-keepers, when they take an antique palace, hasten to fit up a smoldng-room, and, making a paradise of gas jets and liqueurs, write over it '* II Bar Ameri- cano." It is considered very clever to adapt oneself to one's fortunes ; and if so, the rulers of Flo- ralia are very clever indeed ; only the stucco and the straight streets and the frightful boulevards cost money, and Floralia has no money and a very heavy and terrible debt ; and whether it be really worth while to deface a most beautiful and artistic city, and ruin your nobles and gentry, and grind down your artizans B 2 JJV A WINTER CITY. and peasants, and make your -whole province impoverished and ill-content for the mere sake of pleasing some strangers by the stucco and the hoardings that their eyes are used to at home ; — well, that perhaps may be an open question. The Lady Hilda Vorarlberg had written thus far when she got tired, left off, and looked out of the window on to the mountain-born and poet- hj'mned river of Floralia. She had an idea that she would write a novel ; she was always going to do things that she never did do. After all they were not her own ideas that she had written ; but only those of a Floralian, the Duca della Rocca, whom she had met the night before. But then the ideas of everv- body have been somebody else's beforehand, — Plato's, or Bion's, or Theophrastus's ; or your fiivourite newspaper's ; — and the Lady Hilda, al- though she had been but two davs in the Winter City, had already in her first drive shuddered at the stucco and the hoardings, and shivered j\t the boulevards and the little shaven trees. Foi- sho w/s n ppvso/ o vtrvrpfniiMl ;nid fisti- IN A WINTER CITY. dious taste, and did really know something about tlie arts, and such persons suffer very acutely from what the peculiar mind of your modern municipalities calls, in its innocence, "improve- ments." The Lad}' Hilda had been to a reception too the night before, and had gone with the pre- conceived conviction that a certain illustrious Sovereign had not been far Avi'ong when she had called Floralia the Botany Bay of modern society ; but then the Lady Hilda was easily bored, and not easily pleased, and liked very few tilings, almost none ; — she liked her horses, she liked M. Worth, she liked bric-fi-brac, she liked her brother, Lord Clairvaux, and when she came to think of it, — well, that was really all. The Lady Hilda was a beautiful woman, and knew it ; she was dressed in the height of fashion, i. e., like a mediaeval saint out of a picture ; her velvet robe clung close to her, and her gold belt, with its chains and pouch and fittings, would not have disgraced Cellini's own working ; her hair was in a cloud iji front and in a club behind ; her figure was perfect : M. IN A WINTER CITY. Worth, who is accustomed to fui-nish figures as well as clothes, had a great reverence for her; in her. Nature, of whom generall}' spealdng he is disposed to think very poorly, did not need Lis assistance ; he thought it extraordinary, but as he could not improve her in that respect, h(, had to be content with draping Perfection, which he did to perfection of course. Her face also was left to nature, in a very blainable degree for a woman of fashion. Her friends argued to her that any woman, however fair a skin she might have, must look washed out without enamel or rouge at the least. But the Lady Hilda, conscious of her own dehcate bloom, was obdurate on the point. " I would rather look washed out than caked over," she would repl}': which was cruel but conclusive. So she went into the world with- out paintinj^, and made them all look beside her as if they had come out of a comic ojiera. In everything else she was, however, as arti- ficial as became her sex, her station, and her century. She was a very fortunate woman ; at least IN A WINTER CITY. society always said so. The Clairvaux people were very terribly poor, tliougii very noble and mighty. She had been married at sixteen, immediately on her presentation, to a great Em'opean capitalist of nondescript nationality, who had made an enormous fortune upon the Stock Exchanges in ways that were never enquired into, and this gentleman, whose wealth was as solid as it souuded fabulous, had had the good taste to die in the first months of their wedded life, leavmg her fifty thousand a j'ear, and bequeathing the rest of his money to the Prince Imperial. Besides her large income she had the biggest jewels, the choicest horses, the handsomest house in London, the prettiest hotel in Paris, &c., Sec, Sec. ; and she could very well afford to liave a fresh toilette a- day from her friend "Worth if she chose. Very often she did choose. " What a lucky creature," said every other woman : and so she was. But she would have been still more so had she not been quite so much bored. Boredom is the ill-natured pebble that always luill get in the golden slipper of the pilgrim of pleasure. 6 IN A WINTER CITY. The Lady Hilda looked out of the window and found it raining heavily. When the sky of Flo- ralia does rain, it does it thoroughly, and gets the disagreeable duty over, which is much more merciful to mankind than the perpetual drizzle and dripping of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, or Middlesex. It was the rain that had made her almost inclined to think she would write a novel ; she was so tired of reading them. She comitermanded her carriage ; had some more wood thrown on the fire ; and felt disposed to regret that she had decided to whiter here. She missed all her hlbelots, and all the wonderful shades and graces of colour with which her own houses were made as rich, yet as subdued in tone as any old cloisonne enamel. She had the finest rooms, here, in an hotel wliich had been the old palace of Murat; and she had sent for flowers to fill every nook and corner of them, an order which Floralia will execute for as many francs as any other city would ask in napoleons. Dut there is always a nakedness and a gaudiness in the finest suites of any hotel ; and the Lady Hilda, though she had educated J^ A WINTER CITY. little else, liacl so educated her eyes and her taste that a cr'iant bit of furniture hurt her as the grating of a false quantity hurts a scholar. Slie knew the value of greys and creams and lavenders and olive greens and pale sea blues and dead gold and oriental blendings. She had to seat herself now in an arm-chair that was of a brightness and newness in magenta brocade that made her close her eyelids involuntarily to avoid the horror of it, as she took up some letters from female fiiends and wondered why they wrote them, and took up a tale of Zola's and threw it aside in disgust, and began to think that she would go to Algeria, since her doctors had agreed that her lungs would not bear the cold of Paris this winter. Only there was no art in Algeria and there was plenty in Floralia, present and traditional, and so far as a woman of fashion can demean herself to think seriously of anything beyond dress and rivalry, she had in a way studied art of all kinds, languidly indeed and perhaps super- ficially, but still with some true understanding of it; for, although she had done her best, as 10 IN A WINTER CITY. became &femme comme ilfaut, to stifle the intel- ligence she had been created with, she yet had moments in which M. Worth did not seem Jehovah, and in which Society scarcely appeared tlie Alpha and Omega of human existence, as of com'se they did to her when she was in her right frame of mind. " I shall go to Algeria or Eome," she said to herself: it rained pitilessly, hiding even the bridges on the opposite side of the river; she had a dreadful magenta-coloured chair, and the window curtains were scarlet ; the letters were on thin foreign x^aper and crossed ; the book was unreadable ; at luncheon they had given her horrible soup and a vol-au-vcnt that for all flavour it possessed might have been made of acorns, ship-biscuit and shalots ; and she had just heard that her cousin the Countess do Caviare, whom she never approved of, and who always bor- rowed money of her, was coming also to the Hotel ^lurat. It was not wonderful that she settled in her own miud to leave Floralia as soon as she had come to it. It was four o'clock. IN A WINTER CITY. 11 She thouglit she would send round to the bric-a-brac dealers, and tell them to brmg her what china and enamels and things they had in their shops for her to look at ; little that is worth having ever comes into the market in these days, save when private collections are pubUcly sold ; she knew the Hotel Drouot and Christie and Manson's too well not to know that; still it would be something to do. Her hand was on the bell when one of her servants entered. He had a card on a salver. "Does Madame receive?" he asked, in some trej)idation, for do what her servants might they generally did wrong ; when they obeyed her she had almost invariably changed her mind before her command could be executed, and when they did not obey her, then the Claii'vaux blood, which was crossed with French and Russian, and had been Norman to begin with, made itself felt in her usually tranquil veins. She glanced at the card. It might be a bric- a-brac dealer's. On it was written " Duca della Rocca." She paused doubtfully some moments. 12 IN A WINTER CITY. " It is raining very bard," she thought ; then gave a sign of assent. Everybody wearied her after ten minutes ; still when it was raining so bard- '^^:^^'^>^Ti CHAPTER II. " They say," the great assassin who slays as many thousands as ever did plague or cholera, drink or warfare ; " they say," the thief of re- putation, who steals, with stealthy step and coward's mask, to filch good names away in the dead dark of irresponsible calumny ; ** they say," a giant murderer, iron-gloved to slay you, a fleet, elusive, vaporous will-o'-the-wisp, when you would seize and choke it ; " they say," mighty Thug though it be which strangles from behind the jourest victim, had not been ever known to touch the Lady Hilda. She seemed very passionless and cold ; and no one ever whispered that she was not what she seemed. Possibly she enjoyed so unusual U IN A WINTER CITY. an immunity, first, because she was so very ricli ; secondly, because she had many male relations ; thirdly, because women, Avhilst they envied, were afraid of her. Anj^Avay, her name was altogether without reproach ; the only defect to be found in her in the estmiate of many of her adorers. Married without any wish of her own being consulted, and left so soon aftei'wards mistress of herself and of very large wealth, she had remained altogether indifferent and insensible to all forms of love. Other women fell in love in all sorts of ways, feebly or forcibly, according to their natures, but she never. The passions she excited broke against her serene contempt, like surf on a rocky shore. She was the despair of all the ** tucurs de fcmmes" of Europe. "Le mieux est I'ennemi du bicn," she said to her brother once, when she had refused the hereditary Prince of Deutscliland ; "I can do exactly as I like ; I have everything I want ; I can follow all my own whims ; I am per- fectly happy ; why ever should I alter all this ? IN A WINTER CITY. 15 What could any man ever offer me that would be better?" Lord Clairvaux was obliged to grumble that he did not know what any man could. " Unless you were to care for the man,'' he muttered shamefacedly. " Oh !— h !— h ! " said the Lady Hilda, with the most prolonged delicate and eloquent inter- jection of amazed scorn. Lord Clairvaux felt that lie had been as silly and rustic as if he were a ploughboy. He was an affectionate creature himself, in character very like a Newfoundland dog, and had none of his sister's talent and temperament; he loved her dearly, but he was always a little afraid of her, *' Hilda don't say much to you, but she just gives you a look ; and don't you sink into your shoes ! " he said once to a friend. He stood six feet three without the shoes, to whose level her single glance could so patheti- cally reduce him. But except before herself. Lord Clairvaux, in his sho«s or out of them, was the bravest and frankest gentleman that ever walked the 16 IN A WINTER CITY. earth ; and the universal recollection of him and of his unhesitating habit of " setting things straight," probably kept so in awe the calumny- makers, that he produced the miracle of a woman who actually was blameless gettmg the credit of being so. Usually snow is deemed black, and coal is called swans- down, with tiiat refreshing habit of contrariety which alone saves societ}^ from stagnation. It never occurred to her what a tower of strength for her honour was that good-lookmg, good-tempered, stupid, big brother of her's, who could not spell a trisyllable were it ever so, and was only learned in racing stock and greyhound pedigrees ; but she was fond of liim in a cool and careless way, as she might have been of a big dog, and was prodigal in gifts to him of great winners and brood marcs. She never went to stay with him at Broomsdon ; she disliked his wife, her sister-in-law, and she was always bored to death in English country houses, where the men were out shooting all day, and lialf asleep all the evening. The country people, the salt of the cartli in their own eyes, were in- IN A WINTER CITY. 17 finitesimal as ants in hers. She detested drives in pony-carriages, humdrum chit chat, and after- noon tea in the Ubrar}-; she did not care in the least who had bagged how many brace ; the details of fast runs with hounds were as horribly tu-esome to her as the boys home from Eton ; and she would rather have gone a pilgrimage to Lourdes than have descended to the ball, where all sorts of nondescripts had to be asked, and the dresses positively haunted her like ghosts. Five years before, at Broomsden, she had taken up her candlestick after three niglits of unutterable boredom between her sister-in-law and a fat duchess, and had mentally vowed never to return there. The vow she had kept, and she had always seen Clairvaux in Paris, in London, in Baden — anywhere rather than in the home of their childhood, towards which she had no tenderness of sentiment, but merely recollections of the fierce tyrannies of many German governesses. She would often buy him a colt out of the La- gi-ange or Lafitte stables ; and always send half Boissier's and Siraudin's shops to his cbildren c 18 IN A WINTER CITY. at Christmas time. That done, she considered nothing more could be expected of her : it was certainly not necessary that she should bore her- self. To spend money was an easy undemonstrative manner of aclaiowledging the ties of nature, which pleased and suited her. Perhaps she would have been capable of showing her affec- tion in nobler and more self-sacrificing ways ; but then there was nothing in her circumstances to call for that kind of thing ; no trouble ever came nigh her ; and the chariot of her life rolled as smoothly as her own victoria a huit ressorts. For the ten years of her womanliood the Lady Hilda had had the command of immense Avealth. Anything short of that seemed to her abject poverty. She could theorise about maldng her- self into Grcuze or Gainsboro' pictures in serge or dimity; but, in fact, she could not imagine lierself without all the black sables and silver fox, the velvets and silks, the diamonds and emeralds, the embroideries and laces that madti her a thing which Titian would have Avoiishipped. She could not imagine herself for an instant IN A WINTER CITY. 19 without power of limitless command, limitless caprice, ceaseless indulgence, boundless patron- age, and all the gratifications of whim and will which go with the possession of a great fortune and the enjoyment of an entire irresponsibilit}'. She was bored and annoyed very often indeed because Pleasure is not as inventive a god as he ought to be, and his catalogue is very soon run through ; but it never by any chance oc- curred to her that it might be her money which bored her. When, on a very dreary day early in November, Lady Hilda, known by repute all over Europe as the proudest, handsomest, coldest woman in the world, and famous as an elegante in every fashion- able city, arrived at the Hotel Murat, in the town of Floralia, and it was known that she had come to establish herself there for the winter (un- less, indeed, she changed her mind, which was pro- bable), the stir in the city was extraordinary. She brought with her several servants, several carriage horses, immense jewel cases, and a pug dog. She was the great arrival of the season. There was a Grand Duchess of Dresden, in- c 2 20 AV A WINTER CITY. deed, who came at the same time, but she brought no horses; she lured her coupe from a livery- stable, and her star, notwithstanding its royalty, paled in proportion. Besides, the Grand Duchess was a very little, shabby, insignificant person, who wore black stuff dresses, and a Avig without any art in it. She was music-mad, and ^Yagner was her prophet. The Club took no account of her. There is a club in Floralia, nay, it is the Club ; — all other clubs being for purposes gnnnas- tic, patriotic, theatric, or political, and out of society altogether. The Club is very fond of black-balling, and gives very odd reasons for doing so, instead of the simple and true one, that it wants to keep itself to itself. It has been known to object to one man because his hair curled, and to an- other because he was the son of a king, and to another because his boots were not made in Paris. Be its reasons, however, good, bad, or indifferent, it pleases itself; by its fiat newl3'-amYed women are exalted to the empyrean, or perish in obscu- rity, and its members are the cream of masculine Floralia, and spend all fine afternoons on the IN A WINTER CITY. 21 steps and the pavement, blocking up the passage way in the chief street, and criticising all equi- pages and their occupants. "\V]ien the Lady Hilda's victoria, -with the two blacks, and the white and black liveries, swept past the Club, there was a great stir in these philosophers of the stones. Most knew her by sight very well ; two or three knew her personally, and these fortunate few, who had the privilege to raise their hats as that carriage went by, rose im- mediately in the esteem of their fellows. " Je n'ai jamais rien connu de si epatant," said the French Due de St. Louis, who belongs to a past generation, but is much more charming and witty than anything to be found in the present one. " Twelve hundred and fifty thousand francs a-year," murmured the Marchesc Sampierdareno, with a sigh. He was married himself. " Here is your ' affaire,' Paolo," said Don Carlo Maremma to a man next him. The Duca della Ptocca, to Avhom he spoke, stroked his moustache, and smiled a little. ** She is a very beautiful person," he answered; 22 IN A WINTER CITY. " I have seen her before at the Tuileries and at Trouville, but I do not know her at alL I was never presented." " That will arrange itself easily," said the Due de St. Louis, who was one of those who had raised their hats ; " Maremma is perfectly right ; it is in every way the very thing for you. Moi, je m'en charge." The Duca della Eocca shruc^ged his shoulders a very little, and lighted a fresh cigar. But his face grew grave, and he looked thoughtfully after the black horses, and the white and black liveries. At the Enghsh reception that night, which the Lady Hilda disdainfully likened in her own mind to a penal settlement, ]\I. de St. Louis, Avliom she knew very well, begged to be permitted to present to her his friend the Duca deHa Kocca. She was dressed like a mcdiajval saint of a morning ; at night she was a mediaeval princess. She had feuille morte velvet slashed with the palest of ambers ; a high fraise ; sleeves of the renaissance ; pointed shoes, and a great many IN A WINTER CITY. 23 jewels. Delia Kocca thought she might have stepped down out of a Giorgione canvas, and ven- tured to tell her so. He gave her the carte du pays of the penal settlement around her, and tallied to her more seriousl}^ for some considerable time. Himself and the Due de St. Louis were the only people she deigned to take any notice of; and she went away in an hour, or rather less, leaving a kmd of flame from her many jewels be- hmd her, and a frozen sense of despair m the hearts of the women, who had watched her, appalled yet fascinated. " Mais quelle femme imjDossible ! " said Delia Eocca, as he went out into the night air. "Impossible! mais comment done ? " said the Due de St. Louis, with vivacity and some anger. The Due de St. Louis worshipped her, as every year of his life he worshipped three hundred and sixty-five ladies. " Impossible ! " echoed Delia Eocca, with a cigar in his mouth. Nevertheless, the next day, when the rain was falling in such torrents that no female creature was likely to be anywhere but before her fii-e, he 24 IN A WINTER CITY. called at the Hotel Miirat, and inquired if jNliladi were visible, and being admitted, as better than nothing, as she woidd have admitted the bric-a-brac man, followed the servant uj)stairs, and walked into an atmosphere scented with some three hundred pots of tea roses, lilies of the val- ley, and hothouse heliotrope. "All, ah! you have been to see her. Quite right," said the Due de St. Louis, meeting him as he came down the steps of the hotel in the rain, when it was half-past five by the cluck. " I am going also so soon as I have seen Salvareo at the Club about the theatricals ; it will not take me a moment ; get into iiiv cab, you are going there too ? How is Miladi ? You found her charming ? " " She was in a very bad humour," replied Delia Rocca, closing the cab door on himself. " The more interesting for you to put her in a good one." " Would either good or bad last ten minutes? — you know her : I do not, but I sliould doubt it." The Due arranged the fur collar of h.vs coat. IN A WINTER CITY. 25 " She is a woman, and rich ; too rich, if one can say so. Of course she has her caprices " Delia Kocca shrugged his shoulders. " She is very handsome. But she does not interest me." The Due smiled, and glanced at him. " Then you probably interested her. It is much better you should not be interested. Men who are interested may blunder." "She is vain — she is selfish — she is arrogant," said Delia Eocca, with gi-eat decision. " Oh ho ! — all that you find out already ? You did not amuse her long ? " " C'est une femme exageree en tout," j^ur- sued Delia Rocca, disregardmg. " No ! Exaggeration is vulgar — is bad taste. Her taste is excellent — unexceptionable — ■ — " " Exageree en tout ! " repeated Delia Eocca, with much emphasis. " Dress — jewels — habits — temper — everything. She had three hundred pots of flowers in her room ! " " Flower-pots, pooh ! that is English. It is ver}^ odd," pursued the Due pensively, "but they really do like the smell of flowers." 26 IN A WINTER CITY. " Only because they cost so much to rear in their fogs. If they were common as with us, they would throw them out of the window as we do." *' Nevertheless, send her three hundred pots more. II faut commencer la cour, mon cher." Delia Rocca looked out into the rain. "I have no inchnation — I dislike a woman of the world." The Due chuckled a little. " Ah, ah ! since when, caro mio ? " ** There is no simplicity — there is no inno- cence — there is no sincerit}- " **Bah!" said the Due, with much disdain; ** I do not know where you have got those new- ideas, nor do I think they are your own at all. Have you fallen in love with a * jcune Mees ' with npple-rcd cheeks and sweatmeats in her pocket ? Simplicity — innocence — sincerity. Very pretty. Our old friend of a million vaudevilles, L'Ingenue. We all know her. AVhat is she in real truth ? — A swaddled bundle of Ignorance. Cut the swad- dling band — ugh ! and Ignorance flics to Know- ledge as Eve did, only Ignorance does not want to know good and evil : the evil contents her : IN A WINTER CITY. 27 she stops short at that. Yes — yes, L'Ingenue will many you that she may read Zola and Belot ; that she ma}^ go to La Biclie au Bois ; that she may smoke cigars with j'omig men ; that she may have her dresses cut half-way down her spine ; that she may romp like a half drunk harlot in all the cotillons of the year ! Whereas your woman of the world, if well chosen " " Will have done all these thmgs beforehand at some one else's expense, and will have tired of them, — or not have tired ; of the display of spine and of the cotillon she will certamly never have tired unless she be fifty " " That is not precisely what I mean," said the Due, caressing his small white moustache. " No ; I said well chosen — well chosen. AVhat it can matter to you whether your wife smokes with young men, or reads bad novels, or romps till breakfast, I do not see myself. There is a natural destiny for husbands. The unwise fi-et over it — the wise profit by it. But considering that you dislike these things m your own wife, however much you like and admire them in the 28 IN A WINTER CITY. wives of oLlicr persons, I would still sa}', avoid our friend of a million vaudevilles — la petite Mees de seize ans. Ignorance is not innocence, it is a great mistake to suppose that it even secures it. Your Mees would seize Belot and Zola a la reveille des noces . Miladi yonder, for in- stance, when they come to her from her book- seller's, throws them aside, unread " " There w^as a hook of Zola's on her table to- day " " I would bet ten thousand francs that she had not gone beyond the title-page," interrupted the Due, with petulance. " Taste, mon cher Delia Eocca, is the only sure guarantee in these matters. "Women, believe me, never have any piinciple. Principle is a backbone, and no wo- man — except bodily — ever possesses any back- bone. Their priests and their teachers and their mothers fill them with doctrines and convention- alities — all things of mere word and wind. No woman has any settled principles ; if she have any vague ones, it is the uttermost she ever reaches, and those can always be overturned by any man who has any influence over her. lUit Taste is AY A l]'IXTi:U CITY. £0 another matter altogether. A woma i -svh ;se taste is excellent is preserved from nil eccentric it'e ; and most follies. You never see a woman of good sense ajjicher her improprieties or adver- tise her liaisons as women of vulgarity do. Nay, if her taste be perfect, though she have weah- nesses, I doubt if she will ever have vices. Vice will seem to her like a gaudy colour, or too much gold braid, or very large plaids, or buttons as big as saucers, or anything else such as vulgar women like. Fastidiousness, at any rate, is very good 2^ostiche for modesty : it is always decent, it can never be coarse. Good taste, inherent and ingrained, natural and culti- vated, cannot alter. Principles — ouf ! — they go on and off like a slipper ; but good taste is inde- structible ; it is a compass that never errs. If your wife have it — well, it is possible she may be false to you; she is human, she is feminine; but she will never make you ridiculous, she will never compromise you, and she will nat romp in a cotillon till the morning sun shows the paint oir her face washed away in the rain of her perspira- tion. Virtue is, after all, as Mme. de Montes- 30 IN A WINTER CITY. pan said, une chose tout purement geographique. It varies with the hemisphere like the human skin and the human hair ; what is vile in one latitude is harmless in another. No pliilosophic person can put any trust in a tiling which merely depends upon, climate ; but, Good Taste " The cab stopped at the club, and the Due in his disquisition. " Va faire la cour," he said, paternally, to his companion as they went through the doors of their Cercle. " I can assure you, mon clier, that the taste of Miladi is perfect." " In dress, perhaps," assented Delia Eocca. " In everything. Va faire la cour." Paolo, Duca della Eocca, was a very handsome man, of the finest and the most dchcate type of beauty ; he was very tall, and he carried himself with stateliness and grace ; his fixce was grave, pensive, and poetic; in the largest assembly people who were strangers to him always looked at him, and asked, " Who is that ? " He was the head of a family, very ancient and distinguished, but very impoverished j in wars and IN A WINTER CITY. 31 civil war all their possessions had drifted away from them piece by piece, hence, he was a great noble on a slender pittance. It had always been said to him, and of him, as a matter of com'se, that he would mend his position by espousing a large fortune, and he had been brought up to regard such a transaction in the light of a painful but inevitable destiny. But although he was now thii-ty-eight years of age, he had never seen, amongst the many young persons pointed out to him as possessmg milhons, anyone to whom he could prevail upon himself to sell his old name and title. The Great Eepublic inspires, as it is well known, a passion for social and titular distinc- tions in its enterprising sons and daughters, which is, to the original flunkeyism of the mother country, as a Gloii-e de Dijon to a dog-rose, as a Eeine Claude to a common blue plum. Nor are the pretty vh-gins whom the Atlantic wafts across, in any way afflicted with delicacy or hesitation if they can but see their way to getting what they want ; and they strike the bargain, or their mothers do so for them, with a cjaiical candour 32 IN A WINTER CITY. as to their object which would almost stagger the manager of a Bureau de IMariage. Many and various were the gold-laden damsels of the West, who were offered, or offered them- selves, to him. But he could not induce himself; — his pride, or his taste, or his hereditary in- stincts, were too strong for him to be able to all}' himself with rag and bone merchants from New York, or oil- strikers from Pennsylvania, or speculators from Wall Street. No doubt it was very weak of him ; a dozen men of the great old races of Europe married thus every year, but Paolo della Rocca loved his name, as a soldier does his flag, and he could not brave the idea of possibly transmitting to his children traits and taints of untraceable or ignoble inherited influences. Over and over again he allowed himself to be the subject of discussion amongst those ladies whose especial pleasure it is to arrange tliis sort of matters ; but when from discussion it had been ready to pass into action, lie had always nmrmured to his miitch-nudving friend — '* A little more time ! — next year." IN A WINTER CITY. 33 "Bah! ce n'est qu'une affaire de notaire," said his special i:»rotectress in these matters, a still charming Russian ex-ambassadress, who con- stantly wintered in Floralia, and who, having had him as a lover when he was twenty and she was thu'ty, felt quite a maternal interest in him still as to his marriage and prospects. Delia Rocca was too much a man of the world and of his country not to be well aware that she spoke the truth ; it was only an affair for the notaries, like any other barter; still he put it off; it would have to be done one day, but there was no haste, — there would always be heiresses willing and eager to become the Duchess della Rocca, Princess of Palmarola, and Marchioness of Tavig- nano, as his roll of old titles ran. And so year by year had gone by, and he vaguely imagined that he would in time meet what he wanted without any drawbacks : a delusion common to everyone, and realised by no one. Meanwhile, the life he led, if somewhat pur- poseless, was not disagreeable ; being an Italian, he could live like a gentleman, with simplicity, and no effort to conceal his lack of riches ; 34 IN A WINTER CITY. nor did he think his dignity imperilled because he did not get into debt for the sake of display ; he would dine frugally without thinking himself dis- honoured; refuse to join in play without feeling degraded ; and look the finest gentleman in Europe without owing his tailor a bill. For other matters he was somewhat desoeuvre. He had fought, like most other young men of that time, in the campaign of '59, but the result disappointed him ; and he was at heart too honest and too disdainful to find any place for himself in that struggle between cunning and cor- ruption, of which the political life of our regene- rated Italy is at present composed. Besides, he was also too indolent. So for his amusement he went to the world, and chiefly to the world of great ladies ; and for his duties made sufficient for himself out of the various interests of the neglect- ed old estates which he had inherited ; for tlie rest he was a man of the world ; that he had a perfect manner, all society knew ; whether he had character as well, nobody cared ; that he had a heart at all, was only known to himself, his pea- santry, and a few women. CHAPTER III. The next morning the sun slione brilliantly ; the sky was blue; the wind was a very gentle breeze from the sea ; Lady Hilda's breakfast chocolate was well made ; the tea-roses and the heliotrope almost hid the magenta furniture and the gilded plaster consoles, and the staring mirrors. They had sent her in a new story of Octave Feuillet ; M. de St. Louis had forwarded her a new volume of charming verse by Sully Prudhomme, only sold on the Boulevards two days before, with a note of such grace and wit that it ought to have been addressed to Elysium for Mme. de Sevigne ; the i)ost brought her only one letter, which announced that her brother, Lord Claii'- vaux, would come thither to please her, after the D 2 36 IN A WINTER CITY. Newmarket Spring Meeting, or perhaps before, since he had to see " Major Fridolin " in Paris. On the whole, the next morning Lady Hilda, looking out of the hotel window, decided to stay in Floralia. She ordered her carriage out early, and drove hither and thither to enjoy tranquilly the innu- merable treasures of all the arts in which the city of Floralia is so rich. A Monsignore whom she knew well, learned, without pedantry, and who united the more vivacious accomplishments of the virtuoso to the polished softness of the churchman, accomijanied her. The Clain'aux people from time immemorial had been good Catholics. Lady Hilda for her part never troubled her head about those things, but she thought un- belief was very bad form, and that to throw over 3'our family religion was an imijertinence to your ancestors. Some things in the cere- monials of her church grated on her iesthetic and artistic ideas, but then these things she attributed to the general decadence of the whola age in taste. IN A WINTER CITY. 37 Her Monsignore went home to lunclieon -with lier, and made himself as agreeable as a courtly churchman always is to every one ; and afterwards she studied the Penal Settlement more closely by calling on those leaders of it whose cards lay in a heap in her anteroom, and amused herself with its mind and manners, its attributes and antecedents. ''After all, the only 2:)eople in any oountry that one can trust oneself to know are the natives of it," she said to herself, as she Avent to the weekly *' day " of the infinitely charming Marchesa del Trasimene, nata Da Bolsena, where she met Delia Eocca and M. de St. Louis, as everybod}^ meets everj-body else, morning, afternoon, and evening, fifty times in the twenty-four hours in Floralia, the results being antipathy or sympathy in a fatal degree. In her girations she herself excited extreme attention and endless envy, especiall}- in the breasts of those unhappy outsiders whom she termed the Penal Settlement. There was something about her ! — Worth Pingat and La Ferriere dressed the Penal Settle- 38 IN A WINTER CITY. inent, or it said tliey did. Carlo Maremma alwaj^s swore that tliere was a little dressmalcer wlio lived oi^posite his stahle who could have told sad truths ahout many of these Paris-born toilettes ; but no doubt Maremma was wrong, because men know nothing about these things, and are not aware that a practised eye can tell the sweep of Worth's scissors under the shoulder- blades as surely as a connoisseur recognises the hand of Boule or Vernis Martin on a cabmet or an etui. At any rate, the Penal Settlement swore it was adorned by Worth, Pingat and La Ferriere in all the glories and eccentricities imaginable of confections, ^in'ics and vitlangces, Directoire and Premier Empire, Juive and Louis Quinzc ; and if talking about a theory could prove it, certainly they proved tliat they bore all Pans on theii' persons. But there was something about her — it was difficult to say what ; perhaps it was in the tip of her Pompadour boot, or perhaps it hid in the back widths of her skirt, or perhaps it lurked in the black sable fur of her dolman, but a something that made them feel there was m A WINTER CITY. 39 a gulf never to be joassed between them and this worhl-fanied elegante. Lady Hikla woukl have said her secret lay in her always being just a quarter of an hour in advance of the fashion. She was always the first person to be seen, in what six weeks after- wards was the rage : and when the rage came, then Lady Hilda had dropped the fashion. Hence she was the perpetual despair of all her sex — a distmction which she was quite human enough to enjoy in a contemptuous sort of way ; as contemptuous of herself as of others ; for she had a certain vague generosity and largeness of mind which hfted her above mean and small emotions in general. She had been steeped in the world, as people call that combination of ennui, excitement, selfish- ness, fatigue, and gUtter, which forms the various delights of modern existence, till it had pene- trated her through and through, as a petrifying stream does the supple bough put in it. But there were little corners in her mind which the petrifaction had not reached. This morning — it was iialf-past five o'clock in 40 IN A WINTER CITY. a November afternoon, and pitch dark, but of course it was morning still as nobody had dined, the advent of soup and sherry bringmg the only meridian recognised in society — the Lady Hilda refreshed with a cup of tea from the samo- var of her friend the Princess Olga Schouvaloff, who came yearly to her palace in the historical river-street of historical Floralia, and having been assured by Princess Olga, that if they kept quite amongst themselves, and never knew any- body else but the Floralian Russian and German nobility, and steadfastly refused to allow any- body else to be presented to them, Floralia Avas bearable — nay, even really agreeable, — she got into her coupe, and was driven through the gloom to her hotel. Her head servant made her two announce- ments : — JVIadame de Caviare had anived that morning, and hoped to see her before dmner. Lady Hilda's brows frowned a little. The Duca della Rocca had sent these flowers. Lady Hilda's eyes smiled a little. They were only some cyclamens fresh from the country, m moss. She had regretted to him IN A WINTER CITY. the day before that those lovely simple wood flowers could not be found at florists' shops nor in flower women's baskets. After all, she said to herself, it did not matter that Mila had come ; she was silly and not very proper, and a nuisance altogether ; but Mila was responsible for her own sins, and sometimes could be amusing. So the Lady Hilda, in a good- humoured and serene frame of mind, crossed the corridor to the apartments her cousin had taken just opposite to her own. " He is certainly very striking looking — lilte a Vandyke picture," she thought to herself irrele- vantly, as she taj^ped at her cousin's door ; those cyclamens had pleased her; yet she had let thousands of the loveliest and costliest bouquets wither in her anteroom every year of her life, without deigning to ask or heed who were even the senders of them. " Come in, if it's you, dear," said Madame Mila, ungrammatically and vaguely, in answer to the tap. The Countess de Caviare was an English- woman, and a cousin, one of the great West 42 IN A WINIER CITY. country Trehillyons wliom eveiybody knows, her mother having been a Clah'vaux. She had been gi-andly married in her first season to a very high and mighty and almost imperial Russian, himself a most good-humoured and popular per- son, who killed all his horses with fast driving, gambled very heavily, and never amused himself anywhere so well as in the little low dancing places round Paris, Madame Mila, as her friends always called her, was as pretty a little woman as could be imagined, who enamelled herself to such perfection that she had a face of fifteen, on the most fashionable and wonderfully costumed of bodies; she "was very fond of her cousin Hilda, because she could borrow so much money of her, and she had come to Floralia this winter because in Paris there was a rumour that she had cheated at cards — false, of course, but still odious. If she had made a httle pencil mark on some of the aces, where was the harm in that ? She almost always played with the same people, and they had won heaps of money of her. IN A WINTER CITY. 43 "Whilst those horrid creatures in the city and on the bourse were allowed to " rig the market," and nobody thought the worse of them for spreading false news to send their shares up or down, Avhy should not one poor little woman try to help on Chance a little bit at play ? She was always in debt, though she admitted that her husband allowed her liberally. She had eighty thousand francs a year by her settle- ments to spend on herself, and he gave her another fifty thousand to do as she pleased with : on the whole about one half what he allowed to Blanche Souris, of the Chateau Gaillard theatre. She had had six children, three were living and three were dead ; she thought herself a good mother, because she gave her wet-nurses ever so man}' sillc gowns, and when she wanted the children for a fancy ball or a drive, always saw that they were faultlessly dressed, and besides she always took them to Trouville. She had never had any grief in her life, except the loss of the Second Empire, and even that she got over when she found that flying the Eed 44 IN A WINTER CITY. ■ 4 Cross flag had saved her hotel, without so much as a teacup being broken in it, that MM. Worth and Offenbach were safe from all bullets, and that societ}-, under the Septennate, promised to be every bit as leste as under the Empire. In a word, Madame Mila was a t37^e of the women of her time. The women who go semi-nude in an age which has begun to discover that the nude in sculptm-e is very immoral ; who discuss ' Tue-la' in a gene- ration which decrees Moliere to be coarse, and Beaumont and Fletcher indecent; who have the Journal pour Pare on their tables in a day when no one who respects himself would name the Harlot's Progress ; who read Beaudelaire and patronise Teresa and Schneider in an era which finds * Don Juan ' gross, and Shakespeare far too plain ; who strain all their energies to rival Miles. Pose The and La Petite Boulottc in everything ; wlio go sln'imping or oyster-liunting on fashionable sea- shores, with their legs bare to the knee ; who go to the mountains with confections, high heels, and gold-tipped canes, shriek over their gambling IN A WINTER CITY. 45 as the dawn reddens over the Alps, and know no more of the glories of earth and sky, of sunrise and sunset, than do the porcelain pots that hold their paint, or the silver dressing-box that carries their hair- dye. Women who are in convulsions one day, and on the top of a drag the next ; wdio are in hysterics for their lovers at noon-da}', and in ecsta- cies over baccarat at midnight ; who laugh in little nooks together over each other's immorahties, and have a moral code so elastic that it will pardon an}i;hing except innocence ; who gossip over each other's dresses, and each other's passions, in the self-same, self-satisfied chirp of contentment, and who never resent anything on earth, except any eccentric suggestion that life could be anything except a perpetual fete a la Watteau . in a per- petual blaze of lime-light. Pain ? — Are there not chloral and a flattering doctor ? Sorrow ? — Ai-e there not a course at the Baths, play at Monte Carlo, and new cases from Worth ? Shame ? — Is it not a famine fever which never comes near a well laden table ? Old Age ? — Is there not white and red paint, and heads of 46 IN A WINTER CITY. dead hair, and even false bosoms? Death? — Well, no douht there is death, hut they do not realise it ; they hardly beheve in it, they think about it so little. There is something unknown somewhere to fall on them some day that they dread vaguely, for they are terrible cowards. But they worry as little about it as possible. They give the milHonth part of what they possess away in its name to whatever chiu'ch they belong to, and they think they have arranged quite comfortably for all possible contingencies hereafter. If it make things safe, they will head bazaars for the poor, or wear black m holy week, turn lottery-wheels for cliarity, or put on fancy dresses in the name of benevolence, or do any little amiable trifle of that sort. But as for changing their lives, — jpas si hete f A bird in the hand they hold worth two in the bush ; and though your birds may be winged on strong desire, and your bush the burning parterre of Moses, they will have none of them. These women are not all bad ; oh, no ! they are like sheep, that is all. If it were fashionable to IN A WINTER CITY. 47 be vii'tuous, very likely they would be so. If it were chic to be devout, no doubt they would pass their life on their knees. But, as it is, they know that a flavour of vice is as necessary to theii' reputation as great ladies, as sorrel-leaves to soup a la bonne femme. They affect a license if they take it not. They are like the barber, who said, with much pride, to Voltaire, *'Je ne suis qu'un pauvre diable de perruquier, mais je ne crois pas en Dieu plus que les autres." They may be worth very little, but they are desperately afraid that you should make such a mistake as to think them worth anything at all. You are not likely, if you know them. Still, they are apprehensive. Though one were to arise from the dead to preach to them, they would only make of him a nine days' wonder, and then laugh a little, and yawn a little, and go on in their own paths. Out of the eater came forth meat, and from evil there may be begotten good ; but out of nullity there can only come nullity. They have wadded their ears, and though Jerehmia 43 JN A WINTER CITY. ■wailed of desolation, or Isaiah thundered the "wrath of heaven, they would not hear, — they -would go on looking at each other's dresses. "What could Paul himself say that would change them? You cannot make saw-dust into marhle ; you cannot make sea-sand into gold. " Let us alone," is all they ask ; and it is all that j'ou could do» though the force and flame of Horeh were in you. Mila, Countess de Caviare having arrived early in the morning and remamed invisible all day, had awakened at five to a cup of tea, an ex- quisite dressing-gown, and her choicest enamel ; she now gave many bird-like kisses to her cousin, heaped innumerable endearments u^jon lier, and hearing there was nothing to do, sent out for a box at the French Theatre. "It is wretched acting," said the Lady Hilda ; " I went the other night but I did not stay half-an-hour." " That of course, ma chere," said Madame Mila; "but we shall be sure to see people we know, — heaps of people." *' Such as they are," said the Lady Hilda. IN A WINTER CITY. 49 t( At ail}' rate it is better than spendin*:;^ an evening alone. I never spent an evening alone in my life," said Mnie. de Caviare, wl\o could no more live without a crowd about her than she could sleep without chlorodyne, or put on a petticoat without two or three maids' assist- ance. The French company in Floralia is usually about the average of the weakly patchwork troops of poor actors that pass on third rate little stages in the French departments; but Floralia, feminine and fashionable, flocks to the French company bscause it can rely on some- thing taut salt ijeii hazarde, and is quite sure not to be bored with decency, and if by any oversight or bad taste the management should put any serious sort of piece on the stage, it can always turn its back to the stage and whisper to its lovers, or chatter shrilly to its allies. They went into their box as the second act ended ofMme. de Scahreuse ; a play of the period, written by a celebrated author; in which the lady married her nephew, and finding out that lie was enamoui'ed of her daughter, the offspring 50 IN A WINTER CITY. of a first marriage, bought poison for tliem both, and then suddenly changing her mind, with magnificent magnanimity drank it herself, and blessed the lovers as she died in great agonies. It had been brought out in Paris with enor- mous success, and as Lady Hilda and the Countess had both seen it half-a-dozen times they could take no interest in it. ** You icould come ! " said the former, raising her ej'ebrows and seating herself so as to see nothing whatever of the stage and as little as I)ossible of the house. *' Of course," replied Madame Mila, whose lorgnon was ranging hither and thither, like a general's spy-glass before a battle. " There was nothing else to do — at least you said there was no- thing. Look ! some of those women have actually got the oeuf de Paques corsage — good heaven ! — those went out last year, utterly, utterly ! Ali, there is Lucia San Luca — what big emeralds — and there is Maria Castelfidardo, how old she is looldng. That is Lady Featherleigh — you re- member that horrid scandal ? — Yes, I hear thej do visit her here. How handsome Luisa IN A WINTER CITY. 51 Oltoseccoli looks ; powder becomes lier so ; her son is a pretty boy — oh, you never stoop to boys ; you are wrong ; nothing amuses you hke a boy ; how they believe in one ! There is that Canadian woman who tried to get into notice in Paris two seasons ago— you remember ? — they make her quite Creme in this place — the idea ! She is dressed very well, I dare say if she were always dumb she might pass. She never would have been heard of even here, only Attavante pushed her right and left, bribed the best people to her parties, and induced all his other tenclresses to send her cards. In love ! of course not ! Who is in love with a face like a Mohican squaw's, and a squeak like a goose's ? But they are immensely rich ; at least they have mountains of ready money ; he must have suffered dreadfully before he made her dress well. Teach her gram- mar, in any language, he never will. There is the old Duchess — why, she was a centenarian when we were babies— but they say she plays every atom as keenly as ever — nobody can beat her for lace either—look at that Spanish point. s2 52 IN A WINTER CITY. There are a few decent people here this -svinter ; not many though ; I think it woukl have been wiser to have stopped at Nice. Ah mon cher, comment 9a va ? — tell me, Maurice, who is that woman in black with good diamonds, there, with Sampierdareno and San Marco?" * Maurice,' pressing her pretty hand, sank down on to the hard bench behind her armchair, and insinuated gracefully that the woman in black with good diamonds was not " d'une vertu assez forte," to be noticed by or described to such ladies as Mila, Countess de Caviare ; but since identification of her was insisted on, proceeded to confess that she was no less a person than the wild Duke of Stirling's Gloria. *' Ah ! is that Gloria ! " said Madame, with the keenest interest, bringing her lorgnon to bear instantly. *' How curious ! I never chanced to see her before. How quiet she looks, and liow plainly she is dressed." " I am afrnid we have left Gloria and her class no other way of being singular ! " said tiie Lady Hilda, who had muttered her welcome somewhat coldly to iMaurice. IN A WINTER CITY. 63 Maurice, Vicomte des Gommeux, was a young Parisian, famous for leading cotillons and driving piebalds; he followed Mme. de Caviare with the regularity of her afternoon shadow ; was as much an institution with her as her anodynes ; and much more useful than her cornier. To avoid all appearances that might set a wicked world talking, he generall}^ arrived in a city about twenty-four hours after her, and, as she was a woman of good-breeding who insisted on les maurs, always went to another hotel. He had held his present post actually so long as three years, and there were as yet no signs of his being dismissed and replaced, for he was very devoted, very obedient, very weak, saw nothing that he was intended not to see, and was very adroit at lolling cigarettes. "II est si bon enfant!" said the Count de Caviare, to everybody; he really was grateful to the young man, some of whose predecessors had mucli disturbed his wife's temper and his own personal peace. "Bon soir, Mesdames," said the Due de St. Louis, entering the box. " Comtesse, charme de 54 IN A WINTER CITY. voiis Toir — Miladi a vos pieds. What a wretclied creature that is plapng Julie de Scabreuse. I bhish for my country. "Wlien I was a J'oung man, the smallest theatre in France would not have en- dured that woman. There was a public then with proper feeling for the histrionic as for every other art ; a bad gesture or a false intonation was hissed by every audience, were that audience only composed of workmen and work girls ; but now " ^ "May one enter, Mesdames?" asked his iriend, Delia Rocca. ** One may — if you will only shut the door. Thanks for the cyclamens," said the Lady Hilda, with a little of the weariness going off her deli- cate, proud face. Delia Eocca took the seat behind her, as the slave Maurice surrendered his to M. de St. Louis. " Happy flowers ! I found them in my own woods this morning," he said, as he took his seat. " You do not seem much amused, Madame." " Amused ! The pla}- is odious. Even poor Desclee's genius could only give it a horrible fas- cination." IN A WINTER CITY. 55 "It has the worst fault of all, it is unnatural." ''Yes; it is very curious, but the French ^Yill have so much vice in the drama, and the EngHsli must have so much virtue, that a natural or pos- sible play is an impossibility now upon either stage." "You looked more interested in the Majolica this morning " "How, did you see me ? " " I was passing through the tower of the Podesta on business. Is it not wonderful our old pottery? It is intensely to be regretted that Ginori and Carocci imitate it so closely ; it vul- garises a thing whose chief beauty after all is association and age." "Yes; what charm there is in a marriage plate of Maestro Giorgio's, or a sweetmeat dish of your Orazio Fontana's ! But there is very scanty pleasure in reproductions of them, how- ever clever these may be, such as Pietro Gay sends out to Paris and Vienna Exhibitions." " You mean, there can be no mind in an imi- tation ? " " Of course ; I would rather have the crudest 66 IN A WINTER CITY. original thing than the mere galvanism of the corpse of a dead genius. I would give a thousand paintings by Froment, Damousse, or any of the finest living artists of Sevres, for one piece by old Van der Meer of Delft ; but I would prefer a painting on Sevres done yesterday by Froment or Damousse, or even any much less fomous worker, provided only it had originality in it, to the best reproduction of a Van der Meer that modern manutiicturers could produce." ** I think you are right ; but I fear our old pottery painters were not very original. They copied from the pictures and engravings of Man- tegna, Eaffaelle, INIarcantonio, Marco di Ila- venna, Beatricius, and a score of others." ** The application was original, and the senti- ment they brouglit to it. Those old artists put so much heart into their work." " Because when they painted a stemma on the glaze they had still feudal faith in Udliilitv, and when they painted a Madonna or Ecce Homo they had still child-like belief in divinity, ^\'hat does the pottery painter of to-day care for llie coat of arms or the religious subject he in;\y be IN A WINTER CITY. 67 commissioned to execute for a dinner ser^-ice or a chapel ? It may be admirable painting — if you give a very high price — but it will still be only manufacture." " Then what pleasant lives those pottery paint- ers of the early days must have led ! They were never long stationary. They wandered about decorating at their fancy, now here and now there ; noAV a vase for a pharmacy, and now a stove for a king. You find German names on Italian ware, and Italian names on I'lemish gres ; the Nuremberger would work in Venice, the Dutchman would work in Rouen." "Sometimes however they were accused of sorcery ; the great potter, Hans Kraut, you re- member, was feared by his townsmen as possessed by the devil, and was buried ignominiously out- side the gates, in his nook of the Black Forest. But on the whole they were happy, no doubt : men of simple habits and of worthy lives." " You care for art yourself, M. Delia Rocca ? " There came a gleam of interest in her hand- some, languid hazel eyes, as she turned them upon him. 58 IN A WINTER CITY. '^ Every Italian does," lie answered Ler. "I do not think we are ever, or I think, if ever, very seldom connoisseurs in the way that your Eng- lishman and Frenchman is so. Wc are never very learned as to stjdes and dates ; we cannot boast the huckster's eye of the northern bric-u-brac hunter; it is quite another thing with us; we love art as children their nurses' tales and cradle songs ; it is a familiar affection with us, and affection is never very analytical; the Robbia over the chapel- door, the ajDOstle-pot that the men in the stables drink out of; the Sodoma or the Beato Angelico that hangs before our eyes dail}'' as we dine ; the old bronze secchia that we wash our hands in as boys in the Loggia — these are all so homely and dear to us that we grow up with a love for them all as natural as our love for our mothers. You will say the children of all rich people see beautiful and ancient things from their birth ; so they do, but not as we see them — here they are too often degraded to the basest household uses, and made no more account of than the dust which gathers on them ; but that verv neglect of them makes them the more IN A WINTER CITY. 59 kindred to us. Art elsewhere is the guest of the salon — with us she is the X3lay-mate of the infant and the serving-maid of the peasant : the mules may drink from an Etruscan sarcophagus, and the pigeons be fed from a patina of the twelfth century." Lady Hilda listened with the look of awakened interest still in her large eyes ; he spoke in his own tongue, and with feeling and grace ; it was new to her to find a man with whom art was an emo- tion instead of an opinion. The art world she had met with was one that was very positive, very eclectic, very hyper- critical, very highly cultured ; it had many theories and elegant phrases ; it laid down end- less doctrines, and found pleasure in endless dis- putations. Whenever she had tired of the world of fashion, this was the world she had turned to ; it had imbued her with knowledge of art, and immeasurable contempt for those to whom art was a dead letter ; but art had remained with her rather an intellectual dissipation than a tender- ness of sentiment. " As you care for these things, Madame," con- 60 IN A WINTER CITY. tinued Delia Eocca, with hesitation, "might I one clay hope that you would honour my poor villa ? It has little else left in it ; but there are still a few rare pieces of Guhbio and Urbino and Faenza, and I have a Calvar}^ which, if not by Lucca himself, is certainly by Andrea della Eobbia.' "I shall be glad to see them. Your villa is near?" " About ten miles' distance, up in the hills. It was once a great stronghold as well as palace. NoAv it can boast no interest save such as may go with fallen fortunes. For more than a century we have been too poor to be able to do any more than keep wind and water out of it ; and it had been cleared before my time of almost everything of value. Happily, however, the chestnut woods outside it have not been touched. They shroud its nakedness." "Your villa, Delia Eocca?" cried Madame de Caviare, who had known him for several years. " I have never seen it ; we will drive out there some day when tlie cold winds are gone " **Vous )ne comblez de bont^s," he answered, IN A WINTER CITY. 61 with a low bow. " Alas, Madame, there is veiy little that will repay 3-011 : it is hardly more than a mill. But if you and Miladi will indeed honour it . " It is a very fine place still," said the Due de St. Louis, a little impatiently. " It has suffered in sieges ; and is by so much the more interesting. For myself, I endure very much pain from having a whole house, and one built no later than 1730. My great grandfather pulled down the noble old castle, built at the same time as Chateau Gaillard — imagine the barbarism ! — and employed the pon- derous rocaille of Oppenord to replace it. It is very curious, but loss of taste in the nobles has alwaj's been followed by a revolution of the mob. The decadence always ushers in the democracy." ** "VVe may well be threatened then in this day with universal equality ! " said the Lady Hilda, hiding a very small yawn behind her fan. " Nay, Madame," said Delia Rocca. *' In this day the nobles do not even do so much as to lead a wrong taste ; they accept and adopt every form of it, as imposed on them by their tailors, their architects, their clubs, and their munici- G2 IN A WINTER CITY. jialities, as rocaille was imposed by the cabinet- makers." "How fearfully serious you all are!" said Madame de Caviare. " There is that dreadful Canadian woman standing nj) — what rubies ! how fond vulgar women always are of rubies. That passe-partout of hers is rather pretty ; gold thread on hlondine satin, is it not, Hilda ? My glass is not very strong " Lady Hilda looked through her glass, and decided the important point in the affirma- tive. ** How she is rouged ! " pursued the Countess. "I am sure Altavante did not lay that on; he is much too artistic. jMaurice, have you a cigarette?" "It is not allowed, ma chere," said the Lady -Hilda. "Pooh!" said Madame de Caviare, accepting a little delicate paper roll. " It was very kind of you, Hilda, to remind me of that ; you wished me to enjoy it. Won't you have one too ? " Lady Hilda said " No " with her fan, ** If the Eocaille brought the Revolution. IN A WINTER CITY. 63 I>uc," she asked, " what will our smoking bring ? — the end of the world ? " *'It will bring animosity of the sexes, aboli- tion of the marriage laws, and large increase of paralysis," replied M. de St. Louis with great decision. " You have answered me without a compliment —what flattery to my intelligence." *' Miladi, I never flatter you. I am not in the habit of imitating all the world." *' You look severe, Delia Kocca," said Madame Mila. *' Do you disapprove of women smoking? " " Madame, a woman of grace lends grace to all she does, no doubt." " That is to say, you don't approve it?" "Madame, I merely doubt whether Lionardo would have painted Mona Lisa had she smoked." " What a good idea you give me ! — I will be painted by Millais or Cabanel, smoldng. It will be novel. The cigar shall be in my mouth. I will send you the first photograph. Ah ! there is Nordlingen ; he will come over here, and he is the greatest bore in Em-ope. You know what your King here said, when Nord- 64 IX A WINTER CITY. liiicen Liul bored him at three audiences about heaven knows what. — 'I uexev knew the use of sentinels before ; let that man be shot if he ask audience again ! ' "We cannot shoot him ; let us go to supper. Due, you Avill follow us, with M. des Gommeux ? — and you, too, Delia Rocca ? There is that odious Canadian woman going; let us make haste ; I should like to see that blon- dine cloak close ; I shall know whether it looks lilie "Worth or Pingat." She passed out on the Due's arm, and the Lady Hilda accepted Delia Ilocca's, while the Avell- trained Maurice, who knew his duties, rushed to find the footmen in the vestibule, and to arrest another gilded youth and kindred spirit, a M. des Poisseux, whom Madame IMila had espied in the crowd, and charged him to bring with him to supper. Madame jMila preferred, to all the world, the young men of her world of five and twenty or less ; they had no mind whatever, they had not character enough to be jealous, and they were as full of the last new scandals as any dowager of sixty. " They tallc of the progress of this age : con- IN A WINTER CITY. 65 trast M. de St. Louis with M. des Gommeux and M. des Poisseux ! " said the Lady Hilda, with her little contemptuous smile Delia Eocca laughed. " You make me for the first time, Madame, weU content to belong to what the Gommeux and the Poisseux would call a past generation. But there are not many like our friend the Due ; he has stepped down to us from the terraces of Marly ; I am certain he went to sleep one night after a gavotte with Montespan, and has only just awakened." The supper was gay and bright ; Lady Hilda, rejecting chicken and champagne, and accepting only ice-water and cigarettes, deigned to be amusing, though sarcastic, and Madame Mila was always in one of the two extremes — either syn- cope, sal volatile, and hysterics, or laughter, frolic, smoke and risque stories. She and her sisterhood spend their lives in this see-saw ; the first state is for the mornings, when they remember their losses at play, their lovers' looks at other women, the compromising notes they have written, and how much — too much to be 66 IN A WINTER CITY. safe — ^tlieir maids knew of them ; the second state is for the evenings, when they have their war-paint on, have taken a httle nip of some stimulant at afternoon tea, are going to half-a-dozen houses between midnight and dawn, and are quite sure their lovers never even see that any other women exist. *' He could not have a better iQustration of the difference between a woman with taste and a woman without it," thought the Due de St. Louis, surveying the two ; the Countess had a million or two of false cm-Is in a tower above her pretty tiny face, was almost as decollctec as a Greuze pic- ture, chirped the fashionable slang of the boule- vards and salons in the shrillest and swiftest of voices, and poured forth slanders that were more diverting than decorous. Lady Hilda was dressed like a picture of Marie Antoinette, in 1780 ; her rich hau' was lifted from her low fair forehead in due keeping with her costume, she swept aside her cousin's naughty stories with as much tact as contempt, and spoke a French which Marie Antoinette could have recognised as the language in which Voltaii-e once IN A WINTER CITY. 67 scoffed, and Andre Chenier sighed. To be sure, she did smoke a little, but then even the most perfect taste cannot quite escape the cachet of its era. '' It was not necessary, my friend, to say that your place was so poor," said M. de St. Louis, as they went out of the hotel together ; he had known his companion from boyhood. " I am not ashamed of my poverty," said .Delia Bocca, somewhat coldly. '' Besides," he added, with a laugh which had not much mirth in it, '* our poverty is as well known as that of the city. I think the most dishonest Delia Rocca could not conceal it by any adroitness, anj'- more than Floralia could conceal her public debt." " That may be, but neither you nor the town need proclaim the state of your affairs," said the Due, who never gave up an opinion. "You should let her be interested in you before you make it so evident; such silence is quite permissible. You need say nothing ; you need hide nothing ; you need only let things alone." **My dear Due," said Delia Eocca, with a F 2 GS IX A WINTER CITY. laugh that had mehmcholv in it aud some irritation, " think for one moment of that woman's position, and say coukl anything ever induce her to change it — except one thing ? Riches could add nothing to her; the highest rank could scarcely be any charm to her; she has everything she can want or wish for ; — if she liad the power of wishing left, which I doubt. The only spell that might enchain her would be love, if she have any capacity to feel it, which I doubt also. Well — granted love aroused, — what would po- verty or riches in her lover matter to one who has secured for ever a golden pedestal of her own from which to survey the woes of the world ? She refused the Prince of Deutchsland ; that I know, since he told me himself; and men do not boast of rejections ; — what position, pray, would ever tempt her since she refused Deutchs- land ? and he has all personal attractions, too, as well as his future crown." " Still, granting all that, to make your lack of fortune so very conspicuous is to render your purpose conspicuous also, and to draw her atten- tion to it unwisely," said the Due, who viewed IN A WINTER Cl'^f. 69 all these matters calmly, as a kiiid of mixture of diplomacy and business. " Caro mio ! " said Delia Eocca lightly, as he descended the last step. " Be very sure that if I ever have such a purpose, your Lady Hilda has too much wit not to perceive it in a day. But I have not such a purpose. I do not like a woman who smokes." And with a good night he walked away to his own house, which was a street or two distant. The Due chuckled, no wise discomfited. " An Italian always swears he will never do the thing he means to do in an hour," the Due re- flected as he got in his cab. The Delia Rocca Palace was let to many tenants and in various divisions ; he himself retained only a few chambers looking upon the old quiet green garden, high walled, dark with ilex, and musical with fountains. He crossed the silent courts, mounted the vast black stairways, and entered his solitary rooms. There was a lamp burning ; and his dog got up and welcomed him. He slipped on an old velvet smoking coat, lighted a cigar, and sat down : the 70 IN A WINTER CITY. councils and projects of M. de St. Louis were not so entirely rejected by him as he had wished the Due to suppose. He admii'ed her ; he did not approve her ; he was not even sure that he hked her in any way ; hut he could not but see that here at last was the marriage which would bring the resurrection of all his fortunes. Neither did he feel any of the humility which he had expressed to M. de St. Louis. Though she might be as cold as people all said she was, he had little fear, if he once endeavoured, that he would foil in making his way into her graces. With an Italian, love is too perfect a science for him to be uncertain of its results. Besides, he believed that he detected a different character m her to Avhat the world thought, and she also thought was her own. He thought men had all failed with her because they had not gone the right way to work. After all, to make a woman in love with you was easy enough. At least he had always found it so. She was a Avoman, too, of unusual beauty, and of supreme grace, and a great alHance ; her IN A WINTER CITY. 71 money would restore him to the lost power of his ancestors, and save a mighty and stainless name from falling into that paralysis of poverty and that dust of ohscurity, which are, sooner or later, its utter extinction. She seemed cast across his path by a caress of Fortune, from which it would be madness to turn aside. True, he had a wholly different ideal for his wife ; he disliked those world-famous elegantes ; he disliked women who smoked, and knew their Paris as thoroughly as Houssaye or Dumas ; he disliked the extrava- gant, artificial, empty, frivolous life thej^ led ; their endless chase after new excitements, and their insatiable appetite for frissons nouveaux ; he disliked their literature, their habits, their cynicism, their ennui, their sensuality, and their dissipations ; he knew them well, and disliked them in all things ; what he desired in his wife were natural emotions, unworn innocence, serenity, simplicit}'-, and freshness of enjo^^ment; though he was of the world, he did not care very much for it ; he had a meditative, imagina- tive temperament, and the whirl of modern society was soon wearisome to him ; on the other IN A JVINTER CITY. Laud, he knew the world too well to want a woman beside him who knew it equally well. On the whole, the project of M. de St. Louis repelled as much as it attracted him. Yet his wisdom told him that it was the marriage beyond all others which would best fulfil his destiny in the way which from his earliest years he had been accustomed to regard as in- evitable ; and, moreover, there was something about her which charmed his senses, though his judgment feared and in some things his taste dis- approved her. Besides, to make so self-engrossed a woman love ; — he smiled as he sat and smoked in the solitude of his great dim vaulted room, and then he sighed impatiently. After all, it was not a heau rule to woo a iV'oman for the sheer sake of her fortune ; and he was too true a gentleman not to know it. And what would money do for him if it were hers and not his ? — it would only humihatc him, — he felt no taste for the position of a prince consort, — it would pass to his children certainly IN A WINTER CITY. 73 after him, and so raise up the ohl name to its olden dignity ; but for himself He got up and walked to the window; the clear winter stars, large before morning, were shining through the iron bars and lozenged panes of the ancient casement ; the fountain in the cortile was shining in the moonlight ; the ducal coronet, carved in stone above the gate- way, stood out whitely from the shadows. " After all, she would despise me, and I should despise myself," he thought ; the old coronet had been sadly battered in war, but it had never been chaffered and bought. CHAPTER IV. " What do you tliink of Delia Rocca, Hilda," asked Madame Mila at the same hour that night, toasting her pink satin slipper before her dress- ing-room fire. Lady Hilda yawned, unclasping her riviere of sapphires. *' He has a very good manner. There is some truth in ^Yhat Olga Schouvaloff always maintains, that after an Italian all other men seem hoors." "I am sure Maurice is not a boor ! " said the Countess, pettishly. "Oh no, my dear; he parts his hair in the middle, talks the last new, unintelligible, aristo- cratic arr/ot, and has the charms of every actress and dancer in Paris catalogued clearly in IN A WINTER CITY. a brain otherwise duly clouded, as fashion re- quires, by brandy in the morning and absinthe before dinner ! Boors don't do those things, nor yet get half as learned as to Mile. Kose The and la Petite Boulotte." Madame Mila reddened angrily. "What spiteful things to say; he never looked at that hideous little Boulotte, or any of the horrible creatures, and he never drinks ; he is a perfect gentleman." "Not quite that, ma chere ; if he had been, he would never have let himself be called hon enfant by your husband ! " Madame Mila raged in passionate wi*ath for five minutes, and then began to cry a little, whimperingly. Lady Hilda gathered up her riviere, took her candlestick, and bade her good night. "It is no use making that noise, Mila," she said coolly. " You have always known what I think, but you prefer to be in the fashion ; of course you must go on as you like ; only please to remember, — don't let me see too much of Des Gommeux." 76 IN A WINTER CITY. Madame Mila, left alone to the contemplation of her pink shippers, fmned and sulked and felt very angry indeed; but she had borrowed a thousand pounds some six or eight times from the Lady Hilda to pay her debts at play ; and of course it was such a trifle that she had always forgotten to pay it again, because if ever she had any ready money there was always some jeweller, or man dressmaker, or creditor of some kind who would not wait ; and then, though it was not her fault, because she played as high as she could any night she got a chance to do so, somehow or other she generally lost, and never had a single sou to spare ; — so she muttered her rage to the pink slip- pers alone, and decided that it was never worth t\-hile to be put out about the Lady Hilda's " ways." " She is a bit of ice herself," she said to her slippers, and wondered how Lady Hilda or any- body else could object to wluit she did, or see any harm in it. Maurice always went to another hotel. !Mme. Mila lived her life in a manner very IN A WINTER CITY. i1 closely resembling that of the horrible creatures Miles. Rose The and Boulotte ; really, when compared by a cynic there was very little dif- ference to be found between those persons and pretty Madame Mila. But Rose The and Bou- lotte of course were creatures, and she was a very great little lady, and went to all the courts and embassies in Europe, and was sought and courted by the very best and stiffest people, being very chic and very rich, and very lofty in every way, and very careful to make Maurice go to a different hotel. She had had twenty Maurices in her time indeed, but then the Count de Caviare never complained, and was careful to drive with her in the Bois, and pass at least three months of each year under the same roof with her, so that nobody could say anything ; it beino- an accepted axiom with Society that when the husband does not object to his own dis- honour, there is no dishonour at all in the matter for any one. If he be sensitive to it then indeed you must cut his wife, and there will be nothing too bad to be said of her ; but if he 78 IN A WINTER CITY. only do but connive at his own sliame liimself, then all is quite right, and everything is as it should be. When the Prince of Cracow, with half Little Piussia in his possession, entertains the beautiful Lady Lightwood at a banquet at his villa at Frascati, Eichmond, or Auteuil, a score of gilded lackeys shout " La voiture de Madame la Com- tesse ! " the assembled guests receive her sweet good night, the Prmce of Cracow bows low, and thanks her for the honoui- she has done to him; she goes out at the hall door, and the carriage bowls away with loud crash and fiery steeds, and rolls on its way out of the i)ark-gates. Society is quite satisfied. Society knows very well tbat a million roubles find their 3'early waj into the empty pockets of Lord Lightwood, and that a little later the carriage will sweep round again to a side-door hidden under the laurels wide open, and receive the beautiful Lady Light- wood : but what is that to Society ? It has seen her drive away ; that is quite sufficient, every- body is satisfied with that. If you give Society very good dinners, Society IN A WINTER CITY. "79 will never be so ill-bred as to see that side-door under your laurels. Do drive out at the hall-door; — do ; — for sake of les Bienseances — that is all Society asks of you ; there are some things Society feels it owes to Itself, and this is one of them. Of course, whether you come back again or not, can be nobody's business. Society can swear to the fact of the hall- door. Madame Mila was attentive to the matter of the hall-door ; indeed, abhorred a scandal ; it always made everything uncomfortable. She was always careful of appearances. Even if you called on her unexpectedl}', Des Gommeux was always in an mner room, unseen, and you could declare with a clear conscience that you never found him alone with her, were the oath ever required in sltij draw- ing-room in defence of her character. Of course, you have no sort of business with who or what may be in inner rooms; Society does not require you to search a house as if you were a detective. If you can say aii'ily, " Oh, there's nothing in 80 IN A WINTER CITY. it ; I never see him there," Society believes yon, and is quite satisfied : that is, if it wish to be- lieve you ; if it do not wish, nothing would ever satisfy it. No, not though there rose one from the dead to bear witness. Madame Mila would not have done anything to jeopardise her going to Courts, and having all the Embassies to show her jewels in, for any thing that any man in the whole world could have offered her. Madame Mila thought a woman who left her husband and made a scandal, a horrid creature ; nay, she was worse, she was a Blunder, and by her blunder made a great deal of unpleasantness for other and wiser women. After a stupid, ojien thing of that kind. Society always gets so dread- fully prudish for about three months, that it is disagreeable for everybody. To run off with a man, and lose your settlements, and very likely have to end in a boarding-house in Boulogne ? — could anything be more idiotic ? Madame Mila thought that a woman so forget- ting herself deserved even a worse fate than the boarding-house. IMadame Mila, who was quite IN A WINTER CITY. 81 content that her husband should make a fool of himself about Blanche Souris, or anybody else, so long as he walked arm-in-arm now and then with Des Gommeux, and called him " mon cher," — was indeed in every iota the true Femme Galante of the 19tli centm-y. The Femme Galante has passed through many various changes, in many countries. The dames of the Decamerone were unlike the fair athlete- seekers of the days of Horace ; and the powdered coquettes of the years of Moliere, were sisters only by the kinship of a common vice to the frivolous and fragile faggot of impulses, that is called Frou-frou. The Femme Galante has always been a feature in every age ; poets from Juvenal to Musset, have railed at her ; artists, from Titian to Winterhalter, have painted her ; dramatists, from Aristophanes to Congreve and Dmnas Fils, have pointed their arrows at her; satirists, from Archilochus and Simonides to Hogarth and Gavarni, have poured out their aqua-fortis for her. But the real Femme Galante of to-day has been missed hitherto. 82 IN A WINTER CITY. Frou-frou, who stands for her, is not in the least the true tj-pe. Frou-frou is a creature that can love, can suffer, can repent, can die. She is false in sentiment and in art, but she is tender after all ; poor, feverish, wistful, change- ful morsel of humanity. A slender, helpless, breathless, and frail thing, who, under one sad, short sin, sinks down to death. But Frou-frou is in no sense the true Ferame Galante of her day. Frou-frou is much more a fancy than a fact. It is not Frou-frou that Mo- liere would have handed down to other genera- tions in enduring ridicule, had he been living now. To her he would have doffed his hat with dim ej'es ; what he would have fastened for all time in his pillory would have been a very different, and far more conspicuous, offender. The Femme Galante, who has neither the scruples nor the follies of poor Frou-frou, who neither forfeits her place nor leaves her lord ; who has studied adultery as one of the fine arts and made it one of the domestic virtues ; who takes her wearied lover to her fiiends' houses as she IN A WINTER CITY. 83 takes lier muff or her dog, and teaches her sons and daughters to call him by familiar names ; who writes to the victim of her passions with the same pen that calls her boy home from school; and who smooths her child's curls with the same fingers that stray over her lover's lij^s ; who challenges the world to find a flaw in her, and who smiles serene at her husband's table on a society she is careful to conciliate ; who has woven the most sacred ties and most unholy pleasures into so deft a braid, that none can say where one commences or the other ends ; who uses the sanc- titj'- of her maternity to cover the lawlessness of her license ; and who, incapable alike of the self- abandonment of love or of the self-sacrifice of duty, has not even such poor, cheap honour as, in the creatures of the streets, may make guilt loyal to its dupe and partner. This is the Femme Galante of the passing century, who, with her hand on her husband's arm, babbles of her vu'tue in complacent boast ; and ignoring such a vulgar word as Sin, talks with a smile of Friendship. Beside her Frou-frou were innocence itself, Marion de I'Orme were Q 2 84 IN A WINTER CITY. honest)', Manou Lescaut were piintj', Cleopatra ■were chaste, and Faustine were faithful. She is the female Tartuffe of seduction, the Precieuse Ridicule of passion, the parody of Love, the standing gibe of Womanhood. CHAPTER V. The next day the Duca della Rocca left cards on Lady Hilda and the Comtesse de Caviare ; and then for a fortnight never went near either of them except to exchange a few words with them in other people's houses. M. de St. Louis, who was vastly enamoured of his pro- ject, hecause it was his project (what better reason has anybody ?) was irritated and in des- pair. " You fly in the face of Fate ! " he said, with much impatience. Delia Rocca laughed. " There is no such person as Fate — she perished with all the rest of the Pagan world 86 IN A WINTER CITY. when we put up our first gas-lamp. The two I regret most of them all are Faunus and Picus ; nowadays we make Faunus into a railway con- tractor, and shoot Picus for the market- stall." "You are very romantic," said the Due, with serene contempt. ** It is an unfortunate quality ; and I confess," he added, with a sigh, as if confessing a blemish in a favourite horse, *' that, perhaps, she is a little deficient in the other extreme, a little too cold, a little too unimpressionable ; there is absolutely no shadow of cause to suppose she ever felt the slightest emotion for anyone. That gives, per- haps, a certain hardness. It is not natural. * Une petite faiblesse donne tant de charme.' " "In a wife, one might dispense with the 'petite faiblesse ' for anyone else," said Delia Rocca, with a smile ; the blemish did not seem much of a fault in his eyes. " That is a romantic notion," said the Due, with a little touch uf disdain. " In real truth a woman is easier to manage wlio has liad — a past. She laiows what to expect. It is flattering to be IN A WINTER CITY. 87 the first object of passion to a woman. But it is troublesome : she exacts so much ! " " If I were not that, I have seldom cared to be anything," said Delia Rocca. " That is an Italian amorous fancy. Eomeo and Othello are the typical Italian lovers. I never can tell how a northerner like Shakspeare could draw either. You are often very unfaith- ful ; but ivhlle you are faithful you are ardent, and you are absorbed in the woman. That is one of the reasons why an Italian succeeds in love as no other man does. 'L'art de bruler silencieusement le coem* d'une femme " is a supreme art with you. Compared with you, all other men are children. You have been the supreme masters of the great passion since the days of Ovid." ** Because it is much more the supreme pursuit of our lives than it is with other men. How can Love be of much power where it is inferior to fox- hunting, and a mere interlude when there is no other sport to be had, as it is with Englishmen ?" "And with a Frenchman it is always inferior to himself ! " confessed the French Due, with a 88 IN A WINTER CITY. smile. " At least they say so. But every hu- man being loves his vanity first. * Only wounded my vanity ? ' poor Lord Strangford used to say. Pray what dearer and more integral part of my- self could you wound ? ' He was very right. If we are not on good terms with ourselves we can never prevail with others." "Yet a vain man seldom succeeds with women? " " A man who lets them see that he is vain does not : that is another matter. Vanity — ah ! there is Miladi, she has plenty of vanity ; yet it is of a grandiose kind, and it would only take a little more time and the first grey hair to turn it into dissatisfaction. All kinds of discontent are only superb vanities. Byron's, Musset's, Boling- broke's " A horse nearly knocked the Due down in the midst of his philosophies as he picked his way delicately amongst the standing and moving car- riages to the place where the white great-coats ■with the black velvet collars of the liady Hilda's servants were visible. The Lady Hilda's victoria stood in tbat open IN A WINTER CITY. 89 square Avhere it is the pleasure of fashionable Floralia to stop its carriages iii the course of the drive before dinner. TUie piazza is the most unlovely part of the park : it has a gaunt red cafe and a desert of hard-beaten sand, and in the middle there are some few plants, and a vast quantity' of iron bordering laid out in geometrical patterns, with more hard-beaten sand between them, this being the modern Floralian idea of a garden ; to which fatal idea are sacrificed the noble ilex shades, the bird-filled cedar groves, the deep de- licious dreamful avenues, the moss-grown waj's, and the leaf-covered fountains, worthy to shelter Narcissus and to bathe Nausicaa, which their wiser forefathers knew were alike the blessing and the glory of this land of the sun. Nevertheless — perhaps because it is the last place in the world where anybody would be sup- posed ever voluntarily to stop a carriage — here motley modern society delights to group its fusing nationalities ; and the same people who bored each other in the morning's calls, and will bore each other in the evening's receptions, bore each other DO IN A WINTER CITY. sedulously in the open air, and would not omit the sacred ceremonial for anything — unless, indeed, it rained. Perhaps after all Floralia reads aright the generation that visits it. The ilex shadows and the cedar-groves need Vii'gil and Horace, Tasso and Petrarca, ]\Iilton and Shelley. The Lady Hilda, who never by any chance paused in the piazzone, had stopped a moment there to please Madame Mila, who, in the loveliest Incroyable bonnet, was seated beside her. The men of their acquaintance flocked up to the victoria. Lady Hikla paid them scanty attention, and occupied herself bu3'ing flowers of the poor women who lifted their fragrant basket-loads to the carriage. Madame Mila chattered like the brightest of parrakeets, and was clamorous for news. " Quid novi?" is the cry in Floralia from morn- ing till niglit, as in Athens. The most popular people are those who, when the article is not to be had of original growth, can manufocturc it Political news nobody attends to in Floralia ; financial news interests society a little more, be- IN A WINTER CITY. 91 cause everybody lias stocks or shares in some- thing somewhere ; but the news is Gossip, — dear delicious perennial ever-blessed gossip, that re- ports a beloved friend in difficulties, a rival in extremis, a neighbour no better than she should be, and some exalted personage or another caught hiding a king iu his sleeve at cards, or kissing his wife's lady-of-the-bedchamber. Gossip goes the round of the city in winter as the lemonade stands do in summer. If you wish to be choye and asked out every night, learn to manufacture it ; it is very easy : take equal parts of flower of malice and essence of impudence, with several pepper-corns of improba- bility to spice it, some candied lemon-peel of moral reflections, and a few drops of the ammonia of indecency that will make it light of digestion, and the toothsome morsel will procure you wel- come everywhere. If you can also chop up any real Paschal lamb of innocence in very fine pieces, so that it is miaced and hashed and unrecognisable for ever, serve the mince with the vinegar of malignity, and the fresh mint of novelty, and you will lie the very Careme 92 IN A WINTER CITY. of gossip henceforward. Run about society with your concoctions in and out of the best houses, as fast as you can go, and there will be no end to your popularity. You will be as refreshing to the thirst of the dwellers in them as are the lemonade-sellers to the tlu'oats of the populace. Perhaps Fate still Im-ked and worked in the Latin land, and had hidden herself under the delicate marabouts of the chapeau Incroj-able ; at any rate, Madame Mila welcomed the Due and his companion with eagerness, and engaged them both to dinner with her on the morrow in a way which there was no refusing. Madame Mila was discontented with the news of the day. All her young men could only tell her of one person's ruin — poor Victor de Salaris', which she had always predicted and contributed to cause, and which was therefore certainly the more agreeable — and two scenes between married people whom she knew : one because the brute of a hus- band would not allow his wife to have her tallest footman in silk stockings ; the other because the no less a brute of a husband would not let liis IN A WINTER CITY. 93 wife have — a friendship. Madame Mila scarcely knew which refusal to condemn as the most heart- less and the most vulgar. The Lady Hilda dined with her on the moiTOW ; and the little Comtesse, with the fine instinct at discovering future sympathies of a woman " qui a vecu," took care that Delia Eocca took her cousin in to dinner. ** I would give all I possess to see Hilda attcn- drie,'" she said to herself: as what she pos- sessed just then was chiefly an enormous quantity of unpaid bills, perhaps she would not have lost so very much. But the Lady Hilda was not attendrie : she thought he talked better than most men — at least, differently, — and he succeeded in interesting her, probably because he had been so indifferent in calling upon her. That w'as all. Besides, his manner was perfect ; it was as vieille coiir as M. de St. Louis's, and to the ItaHan noble alone is given the union of stateliest dignity with easiest grace. Lady Hilda, who should have been born under Louis Quatorze, had often suffered much in her taste from an age wlieu manner, except in the 04 IN A WINTER CITY. south, is only a tradition, smothered under cigar- ash, and buried in a gun-case. As for him, he mused, while he tallved to her, on the words of the Due, who had known her all her life. "Was it true that she had never felt even a passmg "weakness?" Was it certain that she had always been as cold as she looked ? He wished that he could be siu-e. After all, she was a woman of wonderful charm, though she did go about with Madame Mila, smoke cigarettes after dinner, and correct you as to the last mot made on the boulevards. He be- gan to think that this was only the mere cachet of the world she lived in ; only the mere accident of contact and habit. All women born under the Second Empire have it more or less ; and, after all, she had but little of it; she was very serene, very contemp- tuous, very high-bred ; and her brilliant languid hazel eyes looked so untroubled that it would have moved any man into a wish to trouble their still and luminous depths. She seemed to him very objectless and some- what cynical. It was a pity. Nature had made IN A WINTER CITY. 95 her perfect in face and form, and gifted her with intelligence, and Fashion had made her useless, tired, and vaguely cynical about everything, as everybody else was in her world ; except that yet larger number who resembled Madame Mila — a worse type still, according to his view. It was a pity that the coldness and corruption of the great world had entered thus deeply into her ; so he thought, watching the droop of her long eyelashes, the curve of her beautiful mouth, the even coming and going of her breath under her shining necklace of opals and emeralds. He began to believe that the Due was right. There was no ** past " in that calmest of indolent glances. **You smoke, Madame?" he said, a little abruptly to her, after dinner. She looked at her slender roll of paper. ** It is a habit — like all the rest of the things one does. I do not care about it." *' Why do it then ? Are you not too proud to follow a habit, and imitate a folly ? " She smiled a little, and let the cigarette pale its ineffectual fires and die out. 96 IN A WINTER CITY. " They have not known how to deal with her," he thought to himself; and he sat down and phaj-ed ccarte, and allowed her to win, though he w^as one of the hest players in Europe. Fate had certainly been under the Incroj'able bonnet of Madame Mila. For durin(:j the evening she suddenly recalled his villa, and announced her intention of coming to see it. In her little busy brain there was a clever notion that if she only could get her cousin once drawn into what the Due would call a " petite faiblesse," she her- self would hear no more lectures about Maurice ; and lectures are always tiresome, especially when the lecturer has lent you several thousands, that it would be the height of inconvenience ever to be reminded to repay. A woman who has " petites fuiblesses " is usually impatient with one who has none ; the one who has none is a kind of standing insolence. Women corrupt more women than men do. Lovelace does not hate chastity in women ; but Lady Bellaston does with all her miglit. Pretty Madame IMila was too good-natured and also too shallow to hate anything; but if IN A WINTER CITY. 97 she could have seen her cousin "compromised" she woukl have derived an exquisite satisfaction and entertainment from the sight. She would also have felt that Lady Hilda would have become thereby more natural, and more com- fortable company. ''Dear me, she might have done anything she had liked all these years," thought Madame Mila; "nobody would have known anything — and nothing would hurt her if it were known, whilst she has all that money." For Madame Mila herself, perched on one of the very topmost rungs of the ladder of the world's greatness, and able therefore to take a bird's-eye view therefrom of everythi^.g, was very shrewd in her way, and knew that society never was known yet to quarrel with the owner of fifty thousand a-year. So she carried her airy little person, laden this night with gold embroideries on dull Venetian red, until she looked like a little figure made in Lac, over to the ecarte table when the ecarte was finished, and arranged a morninir at Palcstriiia for the day after to-morrow. He H 98 IN A WINTER CITY. could only express liis happiness and honour, and his regrets that Palestrina was little more than an empty shell for their inspection. The day after the morrow was clear and cloud- less, halmy and delicious ; such days as the Floralian cUmate casts here and there generously amidst the winter cold as a foretaste of its para- dise of summer. The snow was on the more distant mountains of course, hut only made the landscape more lovely, changing to the softest blush colour and rose under the brightness of the noonday sun. The fields were green with the springing cereals"; the pine-woods were filling with violets ; the water-courses were brimming and boisterously joyous. It was winter still ; but the sort of winter that one would expect in Fairyland or in the planet Venus. Madame Mila, clad in the strictest directoire costume, with a wonderful hat on her head that carried feathers, grasses, oleander flowers, and a bird of Dutch Guiana, and was twisted up on one side in a miraculous manner, descended with her jMamice to the Lady Hilda's victoria, lent IN A IVINTER CITY. 99 her for the day. To drive into the country at all was an act abominable and appalling to all her ideas. In Paris, except on race days, she never went further than the lake, and never showed her toilettes in the Assembly at Versailles, because of the endless, drive necessary as a means to get there. In country houses she carefully kept her own room till about five o'clock; and, when forced for her health to go to Vichy or St. Moritz, or any such place, she played cards in the mornings, and when she was obliged to go out, looked at the other invalids' dresses. Mountains were only unpleasant things to be tunnelled ; forests were tolerable, because one could wear such pretty Louis Quinze hunting-habits and the curee by torchlight was nice ; the sea again was made endurable by bathing costumes, and it was fun to go and tuck up your things and hunt for prawns or pearls in the rock-pools and shallows — it gave rise to many very pretty situations. But merely to drive into the country ! — it was only fit occupation for a maniac. Though she had n 2 100 IN A WINTER CITY. proposed it herself, the patient Maurice had a very mauvais quart-cVheure as they drove. The Lady HikLa, who Avas too truly great an elegante ever to condescend in the open air to the eccentricities and hizarreries of Madame Mila — mountebankisms worthy a travelling show, she considered them to he — was clad in her black sables, which contrasted so well with the fairness of her skin, and drove out with the Princess Olga ; Carlo Maremma and M. de St. Louis front- ing them in the Schouvaloff barouche. She did not hate the cold, and shiver from the fresh sea-wind, and Avorry about the badness of the steep roads as Madame Mila did ; on the con- trary, she liked the drive, long though it was, and felt a vague interest in the first sight of Palestrina, its towers and belfries shining white on the mountain side, with the little villages clustered under its broad dark ring of forest. " What a pity that Paolo is so poor ! " said Carlo Maremma, looking upward at it. ** He carries his poverty with infinite grace," said the Princess Olgn. " Ho is worthy of riches," fc^aid the Due. IN A WINTER CITY. 101 Lady Hilda said uothing. Palestrina was twelve miles and more from the city, and stood on the high hills facing the south-west ; it was half fortress, half palace ; in early times its lords had ruled from its height all the country round ; and later on, in the latter half of the fifteenth century, a great Cardinal of the Delia Ptocca had made it into as sumptuous a dwelling-place as Caprarola or Poggio a Cajano. Suhsequently the family had ranged itself against the ruling faction of the province, and had suffered from war and confiscation ; still later, Palestrina had heen plundered h}^ the French troops of Napoleon ; yet, despoiled and impoverished as it was, it was majestic still, and even beautiful; for, unlike most such places, it had kept its girdle of oak and ilex woods ; and its gardens, though wild and neglected, were unshorn of their fair proi^ortions ; and the fountains fell into their marble basins, and splashed the maiden-hair ferns that hung over them as they had done in another age for the delight of the great Cardinal and his favourites. Delia Piocca received them in the southern 102 IN A WINTER CITY. loggia, a beautiful vaulted and frescoed open gal- lery, designed by Bramante, and warm in the noonday sun, as though January were June. A king could not have had more grace of welcome and dignity of courtesy than this ruined gentleman — he had a very perfect manner, cer- tainly, thought Lady Hilda once again. Slie was one of those women (they are many) upon whom manner makes more impression than mmd or morals. Why should it not ? It is the charm of life and the touchstone of breeding. There was only one friend with him, a great minister, who had retired from the world and given himself up to the culture of roses and strawberries. There was a simple repast, from the produce of his own lands, ready in what had been once the banqueting hall. It was made graceful by the old Venetian glass, the old Urbino plates, the old Cellini salt-cellars ; and by grapes, regina and salamana, saved from the autumn, and bouquets of Parma violets and Bengal roses, in old bhie Savona vases. It was a frugal meal, but fit for the Talc-tcllcrs of the Decameron. IN A WINTER CITY. 103 They rambled over the great buildmg first, M'ith its vast windows showing the wide land- scape of mountain and plain, and far away the golden domes and airy spires of the city shining through a soft mist of olive trees. The glor}^ of this house was gone, but it was beautiful still with the sweet clear sunlight streaming through its innumerable chambers, and touching the soft hues of frescoed walls that had grown faded with age, but had been painted by Spinello, by Francia, by the great Frate, and by a host whose names were lost, of earnest workers, and men with whom art had been religion. It was all dim and worn and grey with the passage of time ; but it was harmonious, ma- jestic, tranquil. It was like the close of a great life withdrawn from the world into a cloistered solitude and content to be alone with its God. "Do not wish for riches," said the Lady Hilda to him, as he said something to her of it. " If you had riches j^ou would desecrate this ; you would ' restore ' it, you would * embellish ' it, you would ruin it." He smiled a little sadly. 104 IN A WINTER CITY, "As it is, I can only keep the rains from enter- ing and the rats from destroying it. Povert}-, Madame, is only poetical to those who do not suffer it. Look ! " he added, with a laugli, ''you will not find a single chair, I fear, that is not in tatters." She glanced at the great old ebony chair she was resting in, with its rich frayed tapestry seat, and its carved armorial bearings. " I have suffered much more from the starinj?, gilded, and satin abominations in a millionaire's drawing-room. You are ungrateful " " And you, Madame, judge of pains that have never touched, and cannot touch you. HoAvever, I can be but too glad that Palestrina pleases you in any way. It has the sunshine of lieaven, though not of fortune." *'And I am sure j^ou would not give it up for all the wealth of the Pvothschilds." " No." "How lovely this place would look," Madame Mila was saying at the same moment, out of his hearing, to the Princess Olga, "if Owen Jones could renovate it and Iluby furnish it. Fancy IN A WINTER CITY. 105 it with all the gilding re-gilded, and the pictures restored, and Aubiisson and Persian carpets everywhere, and all those horrid old tapestries,' that must be full of spiders, pulled down and burnt. "What a heavenly place it would be — and what balls one might give in it ! AVhy, it would hold ten thousand people ! " ''Poor Paolo will never be able to do it," said the Princess Schouvaloff, "unless " She glanced at the Lad}^ Hilda where she sat, at the further end of the chamber, whilst Delia Piocea leaned against the embrasure of the window. " I think she has a fancy for him," said Madam Mila. " But as for marrying, you know, — that, of course, is out of the question." "I don't see wh}-," said the Princess. " Oh, out of the question ; " said Madame INIila, hastil}'. "But if she should take a lilcingto him, it would be great fun. She's been so awfully exaltee about all that sort of thing. Dear me, what a pity all those nasty, old, dull frescoes can't be scraped off and something nice and bright, like what they paint now, be put there ; 106 IN A WINTER CITY. but I suppose it would take so much money. I should hang silk over them ; all these clouds of pale angels would make me melancholy mad. There is no style I care a bit for but Louis Quinze. I am having new wall hangings for my salon done by the Ste. Marie Eeparatrice girls; a lovely green satin — apple-green — embroidered with wreaths of roses and broom, after flower- groups by Fantin. Louis Quinze is so cheerful, and lets you have such lots of gilding, and the tables have such nice straight legs, and you always feel with it as if you were in a theatre and expect- ing the Jeune Preinier to enter. Here one feels as if one were in a church." " A monaster}'," suggested Princess Olga. Thereon they went and had then* luncheon, and Madame Mila studying the Capo da Monte des- sert-service, appraised its value — for she was a shrewd little woman — and wondered, if Paolo della Eocca were so poor as they said, why did he not send up all these old porcelains and lovely potteries to the Hotel Drouot : Capo da Monte, she reflected, sells for more than its weight in gold, now that it is the rage of the IN A WINTER CITY. 107 fashion. She felt mcliiied to suggest this to him, onl}^ she was not quite sure how he might take it. Italians, she had heard, were so absurdly proud and susceptible. After luncheon, they went into the green old gardens ; green with ilex and arbutus and laurel and cypress avenues, although it was raid- winter ; and the great minister discoursed on the charms of the country and the beauty of solitude in a way that should almost have awakened the envy of Horace in his grave ; and the Due de St. Louis disagreed with him in witty arguments that might have made the shades of Eochefoucauld and Eivarol jealous. And they rambled and idled and talked and sauntered in those charming hours which an Italian villa alone can create ; and then the Ave Maria chimed from the belfries of a convent up above on the hill, and the winds grew chill, and the carriages -were called round to the steps of the southern terrace, and the old steward brought to each lady the parting gift of a great cluster of the sweet Parma violets. " Well, it's been pleasanter than I thought 108 IN A WINTER CITY. for," said Madame Mila, rolling homeward. " But oh, this wretched, odious road ! I shall catch my death of cold, and I daresay we shall all he killed on these horrible hills in the dark!" Lady Hilda was very silent as they drove downward, and left Palestrina alone to grow grey in the shades of the twilight. CHAPTER VI. " I THINK Italians are like Paissian tea ; they spoil you for any other " wrote Lad}- Hilda to her brother Clairvaux. It was not a very clear phrase, nor very grammatical ; but she knew what she meant herself, which is more than all writers can say they do. Russian tea, or rather tea imported through Russia, is so much softer and of so much sweeter and. subtler a flavour, that once drinking it you Avill find all other tea after it seem flat or coarse. When she had written this sentiment, however, she tore up the sheet of note paper which contained it, and tossed it in the fire ; after all, Clairvaux would not understand — he never un- 110 IN A WINTER CITY. clerstood anything, dear old fellow — and he would be very likely to say all sorts of foolish things while there was not the slightest reason for any one's supposing. i "Do come out here as soon as you can," she wrote instead. " Of course it will all depend on your racing engagements ; but if you do go to Paris to see Charles Lafitte, as you say, pray come on here. Not that you will care for Floralia at all ; you never do care for these art cities, and it is its art, and its past, and its people that make its ii-resistible charm. Floralia is so graceful and so beautiful and so full of noble memories, that one cannot but feel the motley society of our own present day as a sort of dese- cration to it ; the cocottes and cocodettes, the wheel- skaters and poker-players, the smokers and the baigneuses, the viveurs and the viveuses of our time suit it sadly ill ; it wants the scholars of Academe, the story-tellers of Boccaccio ; it wants Sordello and Stradella, Desdemona and Giulietta. ** One feels oneself not one half good enough for the stones one treads upon ; life here IN A WINTER CITY. Ill should be a perpetual Ivyrie Eleison ; instead of which it is only a chorus of Offenbach's. Not that society anywhere, now, ever does rise higher than that ; only here it jars on one more than elsewhere, and seems as proline as if one 'played ball with Homer's skull.' " Floralia is a golden Ostensoir filled with great men's bones, and we choke it up with cigar ashes and champagne dregs. It cannot be helped, I suppose. The destiny of the age seems to be to profane all that have preceded it. It creates nothing — it desecrates everything. Society does not escape from the general influ- ence ; its kings are all kings of Brentford. " Mila — who is here and haj)py as a bird — • thinks Jack Cade and the Offenbach chorus the perfection of delight at all times. " For myself, I confess, neither entertain me ; I fail to see the charm of a drawing-room demo- cracy decollete and decousu ; and I never did appreciate ladies who pass thek* lives in balanc- ing themselves awkwardly on the bar of Dumas's famous Triangle ; but that may be a prejudice — Mila says that it is. 112 IN A WINTER CITY. " By-the-by, tliat odious young Des Gommeux has followed her here — I make myself disagree- able to him. I cannot do more. Spiridion has never interfered, and * on ne pent pas etre plus royaliste que le roi.' But 3'ou will skip all this, or give it to jouv wife. I know I never read letters myself, so why should I expect you to do so ? I am so sorry to hear of Vieille Garde's sprain ; it is too vex- ing for you, just as he was so high in the betting. I hope Sistei" to Simonides turns out worth all we gave for her. There will be racing here in April, but it would only make 3'ou laugh — which would be rude ; or swear — which would be worse. So please conne long before it." She folded up her letter, wrote " Pray try and come soon" across the top of it, and directed the envelope to the Earl of Clairvaux, Broomsdcn, Northampton, and then was provoked to think that she did not want good, clumsy, honest Clairvaux to come at all — not in her heart of hearts, because Clairvaux was always asking ques- tions, and going straight to the bottom of things in liis own simple, sturdy faslnou, and never IN A WINTER CITY. 113 understood anything that was in the very least complex. And then again she was more irritated still with herself, for admitting even to her own thoughts that there was anything complex, or that she did not want to examine too closely — just yet. And then she sat and looked into the fire, and thought of Palestrina, with its sweet famt scent of Parma violets, and its dim noble frescoes, and its mountain solitudes, under the clear winter moon. She sat dreaming about it a long time — for her, because she was not a person that dreamed at all usually. Her hfe was too brilliant, and too much occupied, and too artificial. She was thinking, with a great deal of money, without desecrating it by " restoration ;" but by bringing all the art knowledge in the world to its enrich- ment, it would be possible to make it as great as it had been in the days of its cardinal. What a pastime it would be, what an interest, what an occupation almost for a lifetime to render that grand old palace once more the world's wonder it had been in the sixteenth century ! 114 IN A WINTER CITY. Then slie rose suddenly with an impatient sigh, and went into her bedroom, and found fault with her maids : they had put Valen- ciemies on her petticoats, and she hated Valen- ciennes — no other lace had been so cheapened by imitation ; they had put out her marron velvet with the ostrich feathers for that day's wearing, when they should have laid out the silver-grey cloth with the Genoa buttons ; they were giving her glace gloves instead of peaii de Suede ; they had got out Pompadour boots, and she required Paysanne shoes ; it was a fine dry day. In point of fact, everything was wrong, and they were idiots, and she told them so as strongly as a high-bred lady can demean herself to speak. Each costume was put all together — dress, bon- net, boots, gloves — everything ; what business had they to go and mix them all up and make everything wrong ? Her maids were used to her displeatmre ; but she was very generous, and if they were ill or in sorrow she was kind, so that they bore it meekly, and contented themselves with complain- ing of her in all dii'ections to their allies. IN A WINTER CITY. 115 " If she would only have her petites affaii-es like i)ther ladies she would be much easier to con- tent," said her head maid, who had served the aristocracy ever since the earliest days of the Second Empu'e. "When there were no lovers, there were much fewer douceurs and perquisites; however, they endured that deprivation because Miladi was so very rich, and so easily plundered. Miladi, now, arrayed in the silver-grey cloth with the Genoa buttons and the marabout feather trimming, went out to her victoria, en route to the galleries, of which she never tired, and the visits which immeasurably bored her. She had been in the great world for ten years, and the great world is too small to divert one for very long, unless one be as Madame Mila. Nevertheless, the Lady Hilda found that Floralia interested her more than she would have believed that anything would do. After all, Floralia was charming by the present, not only by the joast. If it had its kings of Brentford, with its Offenbach choruses, so had every other place ; if I 2 116 IN A WINTER CITY. it liacl a pot pourri of nationalties, it had some of the most agreeable persons of every nation ; if trying to be very naughty it generally only became very dull — that was the doom of modern society everywhere. There were charming houses in it, where there were real wit, real music, and real welcome. If people saw each other too often, strong friend- ships could come out of such frequency as well as animosities ; and there was a great charm in the familiar, easy, pleasant intimacies which so naturally grew out of the artistic idling under these sombre and noble walls, and in the palaces where all the arts once reigned. She had begun to take the fair city into her heart, as ever^^one who has a heart must needs do, having once dwelt within the oKve girdle of its pure pale hills, and seen its green watt^rs wash the banks erst peopled with the gorgeous splen- dours of the Renaissance. She even began to hke her daily life in it ; the mornings dreamed away before some favourite Giorgione or Veronese, or spent in dim old t hops full of the oddest mingling of rubbish and of IN A WINTER GITY. 117 treasure ; the twilights spent in picture-like old chambers, where dames of high degree had made theii- winter- quarters, fragrant with flowers and quaint with old tapestries and porcelains ; the evenings passed in a society which, too motley to be intimate, yet too personal to dare be witty, was gradually made more than endurable to her, by the sound of one voice for which she listened more often than she knew, by the sight of one face which grew more necessary to her than she was aware. ** If one could be only quite alone here it would be too charming," she thought, di-ivingthis morn- ing, while the sun shone on the golden reaches of the river, and the softly- coloured marbles caught the light, and the picturesque old shops gleamed many-hued as harlequin under the beet- hng brows of projecting roofs, and the carved stone of dark archways. But if she had looked close into her own heart she would have seen that the solitude of her ideal would have been one like the French poet's — solitude a deux. She did not go, after all, to her visits ; she went 118 IX A WINTER CITY. iastead, in and out of the studios whose artists adored her, though she was terribly hard to please, and had much more acquaintance with art than is desirable in a purchaser. In one of the studios she chanced to meet the master of Palestrina ; and he went wdth her to another atelier, and another and another. She had her Pa3'sanne shoes on, and her gold- headed cane, and let her victoria stand still while she wallced from one to the other of those sculp- tors' and painters' dens, which lie so close toge- ther, like beavers' work in the old grey quarters of the city. Up and down the dark staircases, and in and out the gloomy vaulted passages, her silver-grey cloth with the marabout ruches gleamed and glistened, and to many of the artists proved as beneficent as a silvery cloud to the thirsty fields in summer. She was surprised to find how much she liked it. There was not much genius, and there was a great deal of bad drawing, and worse modelling, and she had educated herself in the very strictest and coldest canons of art, and really cared for IN A WINTER CITY. 119 nothing later than Luca Signorelli, and abhorred Canova and everything that has come after him. But there were some little figm-es in marble of yomig children that she could conscientiously buy; and the little Meissonier and Fortuny- like pictures were clever, if they were mere trick- work and told no story; and the modern oak carvings were really good ; and on the whole she enjoyed her morning unusually; and her com- panion looked pleased, because she found things to praise. As she walked, with Delia Eocca beside her, in and out the duskypassage ways, with the obnoxious Valenciennes under her skirts sweeping the stones, and her silvery marabouts glancing like hoar- frost in the shadows of the looming walls, the Lady Hilda felt very happy, and on good terms with herself and the world. No doubt, she thought, it was the fresh west wind blowing up the river from the sea which had done her so much good. The golden Ostensoir, to which she had likened Floralia, no longer seemed filled with cigar-ash and absinthe dregs ; but fuU of the 120 J^ A WINTER CITY. fragi-ant rose-leaves of an imperishable Past, and tlie shining sands of a sweet unspent Time. She made a poor sculptor happy for a j^ear ; she freed a young and promising painter from a heavy debt ; she was often impatient with their produc- tions, but she was most patient with their troubles. She was only a woman of the world, touched for a day into warmer sympathies, but the bless- ings she drew down on her sank somehow into her heart, and made her half ashamed, half glad. "What was the use of writing fine contemptuous things of society unless one tried to drop oneself some little holy relic into the golden Ostensoir ? She went home contented, and was so gentle with her maids that they thought she must be going to be unwell. Her friend the Princess Olga came to chat with her, and they had tlieir tea cosily in her dressing-room ; and at eight o'clock she went to dine with Mrs. AVashington, an American Paris- ienne or Parisian American, known wherever the world of fashion extended, and was taken into dinner by the Duca della Rocca. IN A WINTER CITY. 121 After dinner there was a new tenor, who was less of a delusion than most new tenors are; and there was a great deal of very aesthetic and abstruse talk about music ; she said little herself, but sat and listened to Delia Eocca, who spoke often and eloquently, with infinite grace and accurate culture. To a woman who has cared for no one all her life, there is the strangest and sweetest pleasure in finding at last one voice whose mere sound is melody to her. On the whole she went to bed still with that dreamful content which had come on her in the day — no doubt with the fresh sea v.'ind. She knew that she had looked at her best in a dress of i^ale dead gold, with old black Si)anish lace ; and she had only one regi'et — that in too soft a mood she had allowed an English person, a Lady Feather- leigh, of whom she did not approve, to be pre- sented to her. She was habitually the one desire and the one despair of all her countrywomen. Except so far as her physical courage, her skill in riding, and her beautiful complexion, which no cold could redden, and no heat could change, 122 IN A WINTER CITY. might be counted as national characteristics, the Lady Hilda was a very un-English Englishwoman in everything. Indeed your true elegante is raised high above all such small things as nationalities ; she floats serenely in an atmosphere far too elevated to be coloured by country ; a neutral ground on which the leaders of every civilized land meet far away from all ordinary mortality. In Floralia she found a few such choice spirits accustomed to breathe the same sether as her- self, and with those she lived, carefully avoiding the Penal Settlement as she continued to call the cosmopolitan society which was outside the zone of her own supreme fashion. She saw it, indeed, in ball-rooms and morning receptions ; it sighed humbly after her, pined for her notice, and would have been happy if she would but even have recompensed it by an inso- lence, but she merely ignored its existence, and always looked over its head innocently and cruelly with that divine serenity of indifference and dis- dain with which Nature had so liberally endowed her. IN A WINTER CITY. 123 " Why should I know them ? They wouldn't please me," she would say to those who ventured to remonstrate, and the answer was unanswer- able. "I can't think how you manage, Hilda, to keep 60 clear of people," said Madame Mila, envi- ousl3% *' Now, / get inundated with hosts of the horridest " "Because you cheapen yourself," said Lady Hilda, very coon3\ " I never could keep people off me," pursued the Comtesse. " When Spiridion had the Em- bassy in London, it was just the same ; I was inundated ! It's good nature, I suppose. Cer- tainly, you haven't got too much of that." Lady Hilda smiled ; she thought of those six or eight thousands which had gone for Madame Mila's losses at play. " Good nature is a very indifferent sort of quality," she answered. " It is compounded of weakness, laziness, and vulgarity. Generally speaking, it is only a desire for popidarit}-, and there is nothing more vulgar than that.'^ "I don't see that it is vulgar at all," said 124 IN A WINTER CITY. Madame Mila, -with some sharpness. ** I like to think I am popular ; to see a mob look after me; to have the shop-boys rush out to get a glimpse of me ; to hear the crowd on a race-day call out ' ain't she a rare 'un ! my eye, ain't she fit ! ' just as if I were one of the mares. I often give a crossing-sweeper a sliilhng in Lon- don, just to make him ' bless my pretty eyes.' Why, even when I go to that beastly place of Spiridion's in Eussia, I make the hideous serfs in love with me ; it puts one on good terms with oneself. I often think when the people in the streets don't turn after me as I go — then I shall know that I'm old ! " Lady Hilda's eyebrows expressed unutterable contempt ; these were sentiments to her entirely incomprehensible. *' How very agreeable — to make the streets the barometer of one's looks — ' fair or foul.' So you live in apprehension of a railway porter's indiffer- ence, and only approve of yourself if a racing tout smiles ! My dear Mila, I never did believe you would have gone lower in the scale of human adorers than your Gommeux and Poisseux." IN A WINTER CITY. 125 **At all events I am not so vain as you are, Hilda," retorted the Comtesse. " You approve of yourself eternally, whether all the world hates you or not. I remember Charlie Barrington say- ing of you once — * I wonder why that woman keeps straight — why should she ? She don't care a hang what anybody says of her.' " " How discerning of Lord Barrington ! If people only 'keep straight' for the sake of what other people say of them, I think they may just as well 'go off the rails' in any manner they like. Certainly, what I chose to do, I should do, with- out reference to the approbation of the mob — cither of the streets or of the drawmg-rooms." "Exactly what Barrington said," returned Madame Mila ; " but then why do you— I mean, why don't you — amuse yourself ? " The Lady Hilda laughed. "My dear! the Gommeux and the Poisseux would not amuse me. I am not so happily con- Btituted as you are." Madame Mila coloured. "That's all very fine talk, but you know it isn't natural " 126 IN A WINTER CITY. "To live decently? — no, I suppose it is not now-a-days. Perhaps it never was. But, my dear Mila, you needn't be too disquieted about me. If it make you any more comfortable as to my sanity, I can assure you it is not virtue ; no one knows such a word ; it is only indifference." "You are very queer, Hilda," said Madame Mila, impatiently ; " all I know is, I should like to see you in love, and see what you'd say then:' The Lady Hilda, who was never more moved by her feather-headed cousin's words than a rock by a butterfly, felt a sudden warmth on her face — perhaps of anger. " In love ! " she echoed, with less languor and more of impetuosity than she had ever displayed, " are you ever in love, any of you, ever ? You have senses and vanity and an inordinate fear of not being in the fashion — and so you take your lovers as you drink your stimulants and wear your wigs and tie your skirts back — because everj'body else does it, and not to do it is to be odd, or prudish, or something you would hate to be called. Love ! it is an unknown thing to you aU. IN A WINTER CITY. 127 You liave a sort of miserable liectic passion, per- haps, that is a drug you take as 3'ou take chloro- dyne — ^just to excite you and make your jaded nerves a httle alive agaia, and yet you are sucli cowards that you have not even the coiu'age of passion, hut label jom: drug Friendship, and beg Society to observe that you only keep it for family uses lilie arnica or lil^e glycerine. You want notoriety ; you want to indulge your fancies, and yet keep your place in the world. You like to drag a young man about by a chain, as if he were the dancing monkey that you depended upon for subsistence. You Hke other women to see that you are not too passee to be every whit as improper as if you were twenty. You hke to advertise your successes as it were with drum and trumpet, because if you did not, people might begin to doubt that you had any. You like all that, and you like to feel there is nothing you do not know and no length you have not gone, and so you ring all the changes on all the varieties of intrigue and sensuality, and go over the gamut of sickly sentiment and nauseous license as an orchestra tunes its strings up every night ! That 128 IN A WINTER CITY. is what all you people call love ; I am content enough to have no knowledge of it '* " Good gracious, Hilda ! " said Madame Mila, with wide-open eyes of absolute amazement; ** you talk as if you were one of the angry hus- bands m a comedy of Feuillet or Dumas. I don't think you know anything about it at all ; how should you ? You only admire yourself, and like art and all that kind of thing, and are as cold as ice to everybody. * A la place du coeur, vous n'avez qu'un caillou;' I've read that somewhere." " ' Elle n'a qu'un ecusson,' " corrected Lady Hilda, her serenity returning. " If Hugo had known much about women he would have said — ' qu'un chiffon ; ' but perhaps a dissyllable wouldn't have scanned " " You never will convince me," continued Madame de Caviare, "that j^ou would not be a happier woman if you had what you call senses and the rest of it. One can't live without sensa- tions and emotions of some sort. You never feel any except before a bit of Kronenthal china or a triptych of some old fogey of a painter. You do care awfully about your horses to be sure, but then as IN A WINTER CITY. 120 you don't bet on anything, I don't see what ex- citement you can get out of them, You won't phxy — which is tlie best thing to take to of all, because it will last ; the older they grow, the wilder women get about it ; look at Spiridion's aunt Seraphine — over eighty — as keen as a ferret over lier winnings, and as fierce as a tom-cat over her losses. Now, that is a thing that can't hurt any one, let you say what you like ; everybody plays, why won't you ? If you lost half 3'our income in one night, it wouldn't ruin you, and you have no idea how delicious it is to get dizzy over the cards ; you know one bets even at poker to any amount " *' Thanks; it won't tempt me," answered Lady Hilda. " I have played at Baden, to see if it would amuse me, and it didn't amuse me in the least ; no more than M. des Gommeux does ! My dearest Mila, I am sure that you people who do excite yourselves over baccarat and poker, and can feel i-eally flattered at having a Maurice always in attendance, and can divert yom'selves with oyster suppers and masked balls and cotillon riots, are the happy women of this world, that I 130 IN A WINTER CITY. quite grant you : oysters and Maurices and co- tillon and poker are so very easy to be got " " And men lilce women who like them ! " " That I grant too; poker and cotillons don't exact any very fine manners, and men nowadays alwa3's like to be, metaphorically, in theii' smoking-coats. Only you see we are not always all constituted of the same fortunate dis- position ; poker and cotillons only bore me. You should think it my misfortune not my fault. I am sure it must be charming to drink a quan- tity of champagne, and whirl round like a South- sea islander, and play pranks that pass in a palace though the police would interfere in a dancing garden, and be found by the sun drink- ing soup at a supper-table : I am sure it must be quite delightful. Only you see it doesn't amuse me ; — no more than scrambhng amongst a pack of cards flung on their faces, which you say is delightful too ; or keeping a Maurice in youi' pocket, like your cigar-case and your handker- chief, which you say is most delightful of all. But good bye, my dear, we shall quarrel if we tallc much longer lilce this ; and we must not IN A WINTER CITY. 131 quarrel till to-morrow morning, because your Dissimulee dress will look nothing without my Austraisienne one. "What time shall I call for you ? Make it as late as you can. I shall only just show myself." *' Three o'clock, then — that is quite early enough," muttered Madame Mila, somewhat sulkily ; but she had teazed and prayed her cousin into accompanying her in Louis Seize costumes, most carefully compiled by Worth from engravings and pictures of the period, to the Trasimene costume ball, and would not fall out with her just on the eve of it, because she knew their entrance would be the effect of the night, accompanied as they would be by the Due de St. Louis and M. des Gommeux as Grand Ecuyer de France, and as Petit Maitre en chenille, of the same century. " Say half-past," answered the Lady Hilda, as she closed the door and went into her own rooms on the opposite side of the stau'case, " I really begin to think she is jealous of Maurice and in love with him ! " thought IMadame Mila, in whose eyes Maurice was irresistible, K 2 132 IN A WINTER CITY. though with the peculiar optimism of ladies in her position she was perfectly certain that he was adamant also to all save herself. And the idea of her fastidious cousin's hopeless passion so tickled her fancy that she laughed herself into a good humour as her maids disrobed her ; and she curled herself up in her bed to get a good night's sleep out before donning the Dissimulee costume for the Trasimene ball, so that she should go at half-past three " as fresh as paint," in the most literal sense of the word, to all the joyous rioting of the cotillon which Maurice was to lead. " You shine upon us late, Madame," said Delia Rocca, advancing to meet the Lady Hilda, when they reached, at four o'clock in the morn- ing, the vast and lofty rooms glittering with fancy dresses. " I only came at all to please Mila, and she only comes for the cotillon," she answered liim, and she thought how well he looked as she glanced at him. He wore a white Louis Treize Mousquetaire dress, and he had the collar of the Golden Fleece about his throat, for, amongst his IN A WINTER CITY. 133 many useless titles, and barren dignities, lie was, like many an Italian noble, also a grandee of Spain. "You do not dance, Madame ?" lie asked. " Very seldom," she answered, as she accepted his arm to move through the rooms. " When medifeval dresses came in, dancing should have been banished. AVho could dance well in a long close clinging robe tightly tied back, and heavy with gold thread and bullion fringes ; they should revive the minuet ; we might go through that without being ridiculous. But if they ivill have the cotillon instead, they should dress like the girls in Offenbach's pieces, as many of them happen to be to-night. I do not object to a mixture of epochs in furniture, but romping in a renaissance skirt ! — that is really almost blasphemy enough to raise the ghost of Titian ! " *' I am afraid Madama Pampmet and the Fiammina must have romped sometimes," said Delia llocca with a smile. "But then you will say the Decadence had already cast its shadow before it." 134 IN A WINTER CITY. *' Yes ; but there never was an age so vulgar as our own," said the Lady Hilda. *' That I am positive of ; — look, even peasants are vulgar now : they wear tall hats and tawdry bonnets on Sundays ; and, as for our society, it is ' rowdy : ' there is no other word for it, if you understand what that means." " Canaille ? " " Yes, Canaille. M. de St. Louis says, the * femme comme il faut ' of his youth is extinct as the dodo : language is slang, society is a mob, dress is display, amusement is liot, people are let into society who have no other claim to be there but money and impudence, and are as ignorant as our maids and our grooms, and more so. It is all as bad as it can be, and I suppose it will only go on getting worse. You Italians are the only people with whom manner is not a lost art." ** You do us much honour. Perhaps we too shall be infected before long. "SVe are sending our lads to public schools in your country : they will probably come back unable to bow, ashamed of natural grace, and ambitious to emulate the IN A WINTER CITY. 135 groom model in everything. This is thought an advanced education." Lady Hilda kughed. ** The rich Egyptians go to English universi- ties, and take back to the Nile a passion for rat- hunting and brandy, and the most hideous hats and coats in the universe ; and then think they have improved on the age of the Pharaohs. I hope Italy will never be infected, but I am afraid ; you have gasworks, tramways, and mixed marriages, and your populace has almost en- tirely abandoned costume." " And in the cities we have lost the instinct of good taste m the most fatal manner. Per- haps it has died out with the old costumes. Who knows ? Dress is after all the thermometer of taste. Modern male attii'e is of all others the most frightful, the most grotesque, the most "gloomy, and, to our climate, the most unsuitable." " Yes. Tall hats and tail coats appear to me to be like the locusts, wherever they spread they bear barrenness in theii- train. But the temper of your people will always procure to you some natural grace, some natural elegance." 136 IN A WINTER CITY. " Let us hope so ; but in all public works our taste already is gone. One may say, without vanity, that in full sense of beauty and of pro- portion, Italy surpassed of old all the world : how is it, I often ask myself, that we have lost so much of this ? Here in Floraha, if we require gas - works we erect their chimneys on the very bank of our river, ruining one of the loveliest views in the world, and one that has been a tradition of beauty for ages. If it be deemed necessary to break down and widen our picturesque old bridges, we render them hideous as any railway road, by hedging them with frightful monotonous i'>arapets of cast- iron, the heaviest, most soulless, most hateful thing that is manufactured. Do we make a fine hill-drive, costing us enormously, when we have no money to pay for it, we make one, indeed, as fine as any in Europe ; and having made it, then we ruin it by planting at every step cafes, and guinguettes, and guard houses, and everj- artificial abomination and vulgarity in stucco and brick- work that can render its noble scenery ridiculous. Do wc deem it advisable, for sanitary or other IN A WINTER CITY. 137 purposes, to turn the people out of the ancient market where they keep their stalls under the old palace walls happily enough, summer and ■winter, like so many Dutch pictures, we build a cage of iron and glass like an enormous cu- cumber frame, inexpressibly hideous, and equally incommodious, and onl}' adapted to grill the people in June and turn them to ice in Januar3% What is the reason ? We have liberal givers such as your countryman Sloane, such as my coun- tr3'man Galliera, yet what single modern thing worth producing can we show ? We have destroyed much that will be as irreparable a loss to future generations as the art destroyed in the great siege is to us. But we have produced nothing save deformity. Perhaps, indeed, we might not have any second Michael Angelo to answer if we called on him; but it is certain that we must have architects capable of devising something in carven stone to edge a bridge ; we must have artists who, were the}^ consulted, would say, ' do not insult a sublime panorama of the most poetic and celebrated valley in the world by putting into the foreground a square guards' box, a stucco 138 IN A WINTER CITY. drinldng-liouse, and the gilded lamias of a dancing- garden.' We must have men capable of so much as that — 5'et they are either never emploj-ed or never listened to ; the truth I fear is that a public work now-a-days "with us is like a plant being carried to be planted in a city square, of whixih everj^ one who i^asses it plucks off a leaf: by the time it reaches its destination the plant is leafless. The public work is the plant, and the money to be got from it is the foliage ; provided each one plucks as much foliage as he can, no one cares in what state the plant reaches the piazza." Lady Hilda looked at him as he spoke with an eloquence and earnestness which absorbed him for the moment, so that he forgot that he was tallving to a woman, and a woman whose whole life was one of trifling, of languor, and of extravagance. "All that is very true," she said, Avith some hesitation ; " but why then do you hold yourself aloof — why do you do nothing to change this state of public things ? You see the evil, but you prescribe no remedy." IN A WINTER CITY. 139 " The only remedy will be Time," lie answered her. " Corruption has eaten too deeply into the heart of this nation to be easily eradicated. The knife of war has not cut it out ; we can only hope for what the medicines of education and of open discussion may do ; the greatest danger lies in the inertia of the people ; they are angry often, but they do not move " " Neither do you move, though 3'ou are angry." He smiled a little sadly. " If I were a rich man I would do so. Poor as I am I could not embrace pubHc life without seem- ing to seek my own private ends from ofiice. A man without wealth has no influence, and his motives will always be suspected — at least here." ** But one should be above suspicion " " Were one certain to do good — yes." " But why should you despair ? You have a country of boundless resources, a people affec- tionate, impressionable, infinitely engaging, and much more intelligent naturally than any other populace, a soil that scarce needs touching to jdeld the richest abundance, and in nearly every small town or obscm'e city some legacy 140 IN A WINTER CITY. of art or arcliitecture, such as no other hind can show " "Despau-! God forbid that I should despan-. I thmk there is infinite hope, hut I cannot dis- guise from myself that there are infinite dangers also. An uneducated peasantry has had its reli- gion torn away from it, and has no other moral landmark set to cling to ; old ways and old venerations are kicked aside and nothing substi- tuted ; public business means almost universally pubhc pillage ; the new text placed before the regenerated nation is, ' make mone}', honestly if you can — but make money ! ' haste, avarice, accu- mulation, cunning, neglect of all loveliness, desecration of all ancientness — these, the modern curses which accompany 'progress' — are set before a scarcely awakened people as the proper objects and idols of their efforts. We, who are chiefly to be moved by our aftections and our imagina- tions, are only bidden to be henceforth inspired by a joyless prosperity and a loveless materialism. We, the heirs of the godhead of the Arts, are only counselled to emulate the mechanical inventions and the unscrupulous commerce of the American IN A WINTER CITY. 141 genius, and are ordered to learn to blush with shame because our ancient cities, sacred with tlio ashes of heroes, are not spurious brand-new lath and plaster human ant-hills of the growth of yester- day ! Forgive me, Madame," he said, inter- rupting himself, with a little laugh, " I forget that I am tedious to you. "With the taxes at fifty-two per cent., a poor landowner like mj-self may incline to think that all is not as well as it should be." " You interest me," said the Lady Hilda, and her eyes dwelt on him with a grave, musing regard that they had given to no man, " and on your own lands, with your own people — how is it there ? " His face brightened. " My people love me," he said, softly. *' As for the lands — when one is poor, one cannot do much ; but every one is content on them^ that is something." " Is it not everything ? " said the Lady Hilda, with a httle sigh ; for she herself, who could gratify her every wish, had never yet quite known what content could mean. " Let us go and look at the ball-room ; Mila will be coming to know 142 IN A WINTER CITY. if we have heard of MacMahon's death, that we talk so seriously." She walked, on his arm, to the scene of tumult, where being hemmed in by lookers-on till the pressure left them scarcely any space to perform upon, the dancers were going through a quadrille with exceeding vivacity, and with strong reminis- cences in it of some steps of the cancan ; Madame Mila and Ladj;- Featherleigh particularly distin- guishing themselves by their imitations of the Chimpanzee dance, as performed in the last winter's operetta of Ching-aring-aring-ching. They were of course being watched and ap- plauded very loudly by the ring of spectators as if they were really the actors in the Ching-aring- aring-ching, which afforded them the liveliest pleasm'e possible, great ladies being never so Lappy now-a-days as when they are quite sure that they might really be taken for comedians or courtezans. It was hard upon IMadame Mila that just as she had jumped so high that La Petite Boulotte herself could scarcely have jumped higher, the lookers-on turned their heads to see the Lady IN A WINTER CITY. 143 Hilda in the doorway on the arm of her white Mousquetau-e. Lady Hikia was beyond all dispute the most beautiful woman of the rooms, she threw them all into the shade as a rose dia- mond throws stars of strass ; and many of the men were so dazzled by her appearance there, that they actually lost the sight of Madame Mila's rose-coloured stocldngs twinkling in the an*. " Paolo fait bonne fortmie," they said to one another, and began to make wagers that she would marry him, or, on the other hand, that she was only playing with him : opinion varied, and bets ran high. Society bets on everything — peace and love, and honour and happiness, are only " staying " horses or " non-stayers," on whose running the money is piled. It is fortunate indeed and rare when the betting is " honest," and if the drinking waters of peace be not poisoned on purpose, or the smooth turf of a favourite's career be not sprinkled with glass, by those who have laid the odds heavily against it. So that they land their bets, what do they care whether or no the sub- ject of their speculations be lamed for life and 144 IN A WINTER CITY. destined to drag out its weary days between the cab-sliafts till the end comes in the knacker's yard ? As for the Lady Hilda, she was so used to be the observed of all observers wherever she went, that she never heeded who looked at her, and never troubled herself what anybody might say. She walked about with Delia Ptocca, talked with him, and let him sit by her in little shel- tered camellia-filled velvet-hung nooks, because it pleased her, and because he looked like an old Velasquez picture in that white Louis Treize dress. Of what anybody might think she was absolutely indifferent ; she was not mistress of herself and of fift}'- thousand a year to care for the tittle-tattle of a small winter citv. It was very pleasant to be mistress of herself — to do absolutely as she chose — to have no earthly creature to consult — to go to bed in Paris and wake up in St. Petersburg if the fancy took her — to buy big diamonds till she could outblaze Lady Dudlej'- -to buy thoroughbred horses and old pictures and costly porcelains and all sorts of biblots, ancient and curious, that might please her IN A WINTER CITY. 145 taste — to obey every caprice of the moment and to have no one to be responsible to for its indul- gence — to write a cheque for a large amount if she saw any great distress that was painful to look upon — to adorn her various houses with all that elegance of whim and culture of mind could gather together from the treasures of centuries — to do just as she pleased, in a word, without any one else to ask, or any necessity to ponder w^hether the expense were wise. It was very agi'ee- able to be mistress of herself, and yet There is a capitalist in Europe who is very un- hai)j)y because all his wealth cannot purchase the world-famous Key of the Strozzi Princes. Lady Hilda was never unhappy, but she was not quite content. Out of the very abundance of her life she was weary, and there was a certain coldness in it all ; it was too like one of her own diamonds. She sighed a little to-night when her white Mousquetaire had led her to her carnage, and she was rolling across the bridge homeward, whilst Madame Mila's gossamer skirts were still twirling, and her rosy stockings still twinkling in 146 IN A WINTER CITY. all the intricacies and diversions with which the Vicomte Maurice would keep the cotillon going until nine o'clock in the morning. In the darkness of her carriage, as it went over the stones through the winding ill-lit streets, she saw soft amorous eyes looking at her under their dreamy lids ; she could not forget their look ; she was haunted by it — it had said so much. The tale it had told was one she had heard in- deed twenty times a year for ten long years, and it had never moved her ; it had bored her — nothing more. But now — a sudden warmth, a strange emotion, thrilled in her, driving through the dark with the pressure of his hand still seeming to linger upon hers. It was such an old old tale that his eyes had told, and yet for once it had touched her some- how and made her heart quicken, her colour rise. ** It is too ridiculous ! " she said to herself. ** I am dreaming. Fancy my caring ! " And she was angry with herself, and when she reached her own rooms looked a moment at her IN A WINTER CITY. 147 full reflection in the long mirrors, diamonds and all, before she rang for her maid to come to her. It was a brilliant and beautiful figure that she saw there in the gorgeous colours copied from a picture by Watteau le Jeune, and with the great stones shining above her head and on her breast hke so many little dazzling suns. She had loved herself very dearly all her life, lived for herself, and in a refined and lofty way had been as absolutely self-engrossed and amorous of her own pleasm-e and her own vanities as the greediest and cruellest of ordinary egotists. *' Am I a fool ? " she said, angrily, to her ov/n image. "It is too absurd! Why should he move me more than anyone of all the others ? " And yet suddenly all the life which had so well satisfied her seemed empty — seemed cold and hard as one of her many diamonds. She rang with haste and impatience for her maid; and aU they did, from the hot soup they brought to the way they untwisted her hair, was wrong ; and when she lay down in her bed she could not sleep, and when the bright forenoon came full of the sound of pealing bells and gay L 2 148 IN A WINTER CITY. street songs and hunying feet, she fell into feverish dreams, and, waking later, did not know what ailed her. From that time Delia Eocca ceased to avoid the Hotel Murat ; he was received there oftener than on her " day ;" he went about with her on various pilgrimages to quaint old out-of-the-way nooks of forgotten art which he could tell her of, knowing every nook and corner of his native city ; she almost always invited him when she had other people to dine with her ; her cousin did the same, and he was usually included in all those mani- fold schemes for diversions which women like Madame Mila are always setting on foot, thinking with Diderot's vagabond that it is something at any rate to have got rid of Time. Sometimes he availed himself of these oppor- tunities of Fortune, sometimes he did not. His conduct had a variableness about it which did more than anything else would have done to arrest the attention of a woman sated with homage as the Lady Hilda had been all her days. She missed him when he was absent; she was influenced by him whon he was prcseait. IN A WINTER CITY. 1^9 Beneath tlie softness of liis manner there was a certam seriousness which had its weight with her. He made her feel ashamed of many things. Something in his way of life also attracted her. There are a freedom and simplicity in all the habits of an Italian noble that are in strong con- trast with the formal conventionalism of the ways of other men ; there is a feudal affectionateness of relation between him and his dependants which is not like anything else ; when he knows any- thing of agriculture, and interests himself per- sonally in his people, the result is an existence which makes the life of the Paris flaneurs and the London idlers look very poor indeed. Palestrina often saw its lord drive thither by six in the morning, walk over his fields, hear grievances and redress them, mark out new vine- walks with his bailiff, watch his white oxen turn the sods of the steep slopes, and plan trencli- cuttings to arrest the winter-swollen brooks, long before the men of his degree in Paris or in Lon- don opened their heavy eyes to call for their morning taste of brandy, and awoke to the recol- 150 IN A WINTER CITY. lection of their night's gaming losses, or their wagers on coming races. The finest of fine gentlemen, the grandest of grand seigneurs, in com't or drawing-room or diplo- matic circle, Paolo della Eocca, amongst his own gi'ey ohve orchards and the fragrance of his great wooden storehouses, was as simple as Cin- cinnatus, laughed like a hoy with his old steward, caressed, like a woman the hroad heads of his beasts at the plough, and sat under a great mulberry to break his bread at noonday, hearkening to the talk of his peasants as though he w^ere one of them. The old Etrurian gentleness and love of the rural hfe are still alive in this land ; may the}' never perish, for they are to the nation, as the timely rains to the vine, as the sweet strong sun to the harvest. This simplicity, this naturalness, which in the Italian will often underlie the highest polish of culture and of cetemony, had a curious fascination for a woman in whose own life there had been no place for simi^licity and no thought for nature. She had been in the bonds of the world alwavs. IN A WINTER CITY. 151 as a child in its swaddling bands ; none the less so because she had been one of its leaders in those matters of supreme fashion wherein she had reigned as a goddess. Pier life had been alto- . gather artificial ; she had always been a great garden lily in a hothouse, she had never known what it was to be blown by a fresh breeze on a sun-swept moorland like a heather flower. The hothouse shelters from all chills and is full of perfume, but you can see no horizon from it ; that alone is the joy of the moorland. Now and then, garden lily in a stove-heated palace though she was, some vague want, some dim unful- filled wish, had stirred in her ; she began to think now that it had been for that unknown horizon. " Men live too much in herds, in crowded rooms, amongst stoves and gas jets," he said to her once. " There are only two atmospheres that do one morally any good — the open air and the air of the cloister." " You mean that there are only two things that are good — activity and meditation ? " " I think so. The fault of society is that it 152 ■ IN A WINTER CITY. substitutes for those, stimulants and stagna- tion." He made her think — he influenced her more than she knew. Under the caressing subserviency to her as of a courtier, she felt the power of a man who discerned life more clearly and more wisely than herself. The chief evil of society lies in the enormous importance which it gives to trifles. She began to feel that with all her splendour she had been only occupied with trifles. Nature had been a sealed book to her, and she began to doubt that she had even understood Art. ** If you can be pleased with this," says a great art-critic, * this ' being a little fresco of St. Anne, ** you can see Floralia. But if not, — by all means amuse yourself there, if you find it amusing, as long as you like; you can never see it." The test may be a little exaggerated, but the general meaning of his words is correct. Cosmopolitan and Anglo-American Floralia, for the main part, do not see the city they come to winter in ; sec nothing of its glories, of its IN A WINTER CITY. 153 sanctities, of its almost divinities ; see only theii* own friends, tlieii* own faces, their own fans, flirtations, and fallals, reflected as in mirrors all around them, and filling up their horizon. "A Dutchman can be just as solemnly and entirely contemj^lative of a lemon-pip and a cheese- paring as an Italian of the Virgin in glory." Cosmopolitan and Anglo-American Floralia is in love with its lemon-pips, and has no eyes for the Glor3\ When it has an eye, indeed, it is almost worse, because it is bent then on buying the Glory for its drawing-room staircase, or worse yet, on selling it again at a profit. The Lad}' Hilda, who did not love lemon-pips, but who yet had never seen the Glory with that simplicity, as of a child's worship, wliich alone constitutes the true sight, began to unlearn many of her theories, and to learn very much in emotion and vision, as she carried her delicate disdainful head into the little dusky chapels and the quiet praj'er-worn chauntries of Floralia. Her love of Art had after all been a cold, she began to think a poor, passion. She had studied the philosophy of Art, had been learned in the 154 IN A WINTER CITY. — — — ■ ■ ■■■ ■ ■ .1 ■ -. ■. .^s contemplative and the dramatic schools, had known the signs manual of this epoch and the other, had discoursed learnedly of Lombard and Byzantine, of objective and subjective, of archaic and naturalistic ; but all the while it had been not very much more than a scholarly jargon, a graceful pedantry, which had served to make her doubly scornful of those more ignorant. Art is a fashion in some cii'cles, as religion is in some, and license is in others ; and Art had been scarcely deeper than a fashion with her, or cared for more deeply than as a superior kind of furniture. But here, in this, the sweetest, noblest, most hallowed city of the world, which has been so full of genius in other times, that the fragrance thereof remains, as it were, ujion the very stones, like that Persian attar, to make one ounce of which a hundred thousand roses die, here sometlnng much deeper yet much simpler came upon her. Her theories melted away into pure rever- ence, her philosophies faded into tenderness ; new revelations of human life came to her IN A WINTER CITY. 155 before those spiritual imaginings of men to whom the bkie sky had seemed full of angels, and the watches of the night been stirred by the voice of God : before those old panels and old frescoes, often so simple, often so pathetic, always so sincere in faith and in work, she grew herseli* simj)ler and of more humility, and learned that art is a religion for whose right understanding one must needs become "even as a little child." She had been in great art cities before ; in the home of Tintoretto and the Veronese, in the asylum of the Madomia de San Sisto, in the stone wilderness of Ludwig where the Faun sleeps in exile, in mighty Rome itself; but she had not felt as she felt now. She had been full of appre- ciation of then- art, but they had left her as they had found her, cold, vain, self-engrossed, entirely shut in a Holy of Holies of culture and of criti- cism ; she had covered her Cavalcaselle with pencil notes, and had glanced from a predella or a pieta to the pages of her Euskin with a serene Bmile of doubt. But here and now Art ceased to be science, 156 IN A WINTER CITY. and became emotion in her. Why was it ? — she did not care to ask herself. Only all her old i^hilosophies seemed falling about her like shed leaves, and her old self seemed to her but a purposeless frivolous chill}' creature. The real reason she would not face, and indeed as vet was not conscious of: the reason tliat love had entered into her, and that love, if it be worth the name, has always two hand- maidens : swift sympathy, and sad humihty, keeping step together. CHAPTER VII. Foreign Floralia, i.e., that portion of Floralia which is not indigenous to the soil, but has only flown south with the swallows, is remarkable for a really god-like consciousness — it knows every- thing about every bod}', and all things, past, pre- sent, and to come, that ever did, could, would, should, cannot, will not, or never shall happen; and is aware of all things that have ever taken place, and of a great many things that never have done so. It is much better informed about you than you are yourself; knows your morals better than your confessor, your constitution better than your doctor, your income better than your banker, and the day you were born on, better than your mother. 158 IN A WINTER CITY. It is omniscient and omnij)resent, microscopic and telescoj)ic ; it is a court-edition of Scotland Yard, and a pocket-edition of the Cabinet Noir ; it speeds as many interrogations as a telegraph- ■wii'e, and has as man}' mysteries as the agony cokimn of a newspaper — only it always answers its own questions, and has all the keys to its own mysteries, and what is still more comfortmg, always knows everything for " certain." It knows that you starve your servants because you are poor and like to save on the butcher and baker ; it knows that you ovei'pay them because 3'ou are rich and want them to keep your secrets ; it knows that your great grandmother's second cousin was hanged for forgery at Tyburn ; it knows that your silk stockings have cotton tops to them; it knows that your heirloom-guipure is imitation, made the other day at Eapallo ; it Imows that your Embassy only receives you be- cause — hush — a great personage — ah, so very shocking ; it knows that you had green peas six weeks before anj'body else; it knows that you have had four dinner parties this week and are hving on your capital ; it knows that when you were in IN A WINTER CITY. 159 Rome you only went to the Quii-inal Wednesdays, because {icMsper, ichisper, ivhisper) — oli, indeed it is perfectly true — had it on the best authority — dreadful, incredible, but perfectly true ! In point of fact there is nothing it doesn't know. Except, to be sui'e, it never knows that Mrs. Potiphar is not vii-tuous, or that Lady jMessaHna is not everything she should be; this it never knows and never admits, because if it did it could not very well drink the Potiphar champagne, and might lose for its daughters the Messalina balls. Indeed its perpetual loquacity, which is "as the waters come down at Lodore," has most solemn and impressive interludes of refreshing dumbness and deafness when any incautious speaker, not trained to its ways, hints that Mrs. Potiphar lives in a queer manner, or that Lady Messalina would be out of society anywhere else; then in- deed does Anglo-Saxon Floralia draw itself up with an injm-ed dignity, and rebuke you with the murmur of — Christian charity. In other respects however it has the soul of Samuel Pepys multiphed by five thousand. 160 IN A WINTER CITY. It watclied the progress of intimacy between Lady Hilda and the ruined lord of Palestrina, and knew "all about it," — knew a vast deal more than the persons concerned, of course ; it always does, or what would be the use of talking? Gossiping over its bonbons and tea in the many pleasant houses in which the south wintering northern swallows nestle, it knew that he and she had been in love years and years before ; the family would not let her marry him because he was so poor ; it was the discovery of his letters to her that had killed poor old rich Vorarlberg ; he and her brother had fought in the Bois — indeed ! — oh yes, it was hushed up at the time, but it was quite true, and he had shot her brother in the sliouldor; the surg,eon who liad attended the wounded man had told the physician who had attended the sister-in-law of the cousin of the most intimate friend of the lady who had vouched for this. There could not be better autho- rity. But there never was anything against her ? — oh dear me, no, never anything — everybody said this very wannly, because everybody had been, IN A WINTER CITY. 161 hoped to be, or at least would not despair of being, introduced to her and asked to dinner. It was very romantic, really most interesting ; they had not met for nine years, and now ! — ah, that explained all her cokhiQss then, and that extraordinary rejection of the Crown Prince of Deutschland, which nobody ever had been able to understand. But was it not strange that he had never tried to resume his old influence before ? No, he was as proud as he was poor, and besides they had quarrelled after the duel with her brother; they had parted one night very bitterl}', after one of the Empress's balls at St. Cloud, out on the terrace there ; but he had always refused to give up her portrait ; somebody had seen it upon his chest when he had been stripped in the hospital after Custozza; oh yes, they remembered that perfectl3% Altogether the}- made such a very pretty story that it was quite a pity that it was not true, and that the subjects of it had never met until the Due de St. Louis had brought them face to face that winter. The one real truth which did begin to embitter the life of the Lady Hilda and Ho 162 IN A WINTER CITY. heavy on her thoughts, waking and sleeping, was one that the garrulous gossiping Pepys-lilie northern swallows, chirping so husily, did not guess at all. Indeed, this is the sad fate which generall}'^ hefalls Gossip. It is like the poor devil in the legend of Fugger's Teuffelpalast at Trent ; it toils till cock- crow picking up the widel^'-scattered grains of corn by millions till the bushel measure is piled high, and lo ! — the five grains that are the grains always escape its sight and roll away and hide themselves. The poor devil, bemg a primitive creature, shrieked and flew away in despair at his failure. Gossip hugs its false measure and says loftily that the five real grains are of no conse- quence whatever. The Due de St. Louis, who had not got the five grains any more than they had, yet who could have told them then.' bushelful was all wrong, like a wise man, seeing the project of his afiec- tions in a fair way towards realization — at least, so he thought — prudently abstained from saying one word about it to any one. " Trop de zele " spoiled everything, he knew, tN A WINTER CITY. 163 from poKtics to omelettes, from the making of proselytes to the fr3-ing of artichokes. A breath too much has before now toppled down the most carefully built house of cards. When to let things alone is perhaps the subtlest, rarest, and most useful of all knowledge. A man here and there has it ; it may be said that no woman has, has had, or ever will have it. If Napoleon had had it he might have died at eighty at St.. Cloud instead of St. Helena. But genius, like woman, never has been known to have it. For genius and caution are as far apart as the poles. " Tout va bien," the Due said to himself, taking off his hat to her when he saw Delia Eocca by her carriage ; meeting them in discus- sion before some painting or statue that she was about to buy; or watching them tete-a-tete on some couch of a baUroom, or in some nook of a gas-ht grove of camellias. " Tout va bien," said the Due, smiling to him- self, and speeding on his way to his various mis- sions, reconciling angry ladies, making the prettiest flatteries to pretty ones, seeking some imolitain- M 2 IN A WINTER CITY. able enamel, ivory, or elzevir, penning sparkling proverbs in verse, arranging costume (|u;i- drilles, preventing duels, and siniling on debu tantes, adjusting old quarrels, and hearing new tenors ; always in a whirl of engagements, always courted and courteous, ahvays the busiest, the wittiest, the happiest, the most urbane, the most charming, the most serene person in all Floralia. ** Tout va bien," said the Due, and the town with him : the two persons concerned were neither of them quite so sure. Meanwhile, for a little space the name and fame and ways and wonders of the Lady Hilda which filled Floralia with a blaze as of electric lights, quelling all lesser luminaries, was almost dis- regarded m a colossal sentiment, a gigantic dis- cussion, a debate which, for endless eloquence and breathless conflict, would require the dith^v rambs of Pindar meetly to record : — the grave questio)! of who would, and who would not, go to the Postiche ball. ** Number One goes to dine with Number Two, only that he may say he did so to Number Tluee," som^ cynic has declared ; but Floralia improves IN A WINTER CITY. , 165 even on this ; before it goes to dine or dance, it si)ends the whole week in trying to find out who all the Number Fours will be, or in declaring that if such and such a Number Four goes it does not think it can go itself — ■ out of principle — all which diversions wile its time awa}' and serve to amuse it as a box of toys a child. Not that it ever fails to go and dine or dance, — only it likes to discuss it dubiously in this way. The Postiche ball was really a thing to move society to its depths. The wintering-swallows had never been so fluttered about anything since the mighty and immortal question of the previous season, Avhen a Prince of the H. Pi. Empire, a United Nether- lands Minister, and a Due et Pair of France, had all been asked to dinner together with their respective wives at an American house, and the hostess and all the swallows with her had lived in agonies for ten days previously, torn to pieces by the terrible doubts of Precedence ; be^seeching and receiving countless counsels and councillors, and consulting authorities and quoting precedents 166 IN A WINTER CITY. with the research of Max Miiller and the zeal of Dr. Kenealy. But the Postiche ball was a much wider, in- deed almost an international matter ; because the Anglo-Saxon races had staked theu' hves that it should be a success ; and the Latm and Musco- vite had declared that it would be a failure ; and everybody was djdng to go, and yet everybody was ashamed to go, a state of mind which con- stitutes the highest sort of social ecstacy in this age of composite emotions. Mr. and Mrs. Joshua E. Postiche, some said, were Jews, and some said were Dutch, and some said were half-castes from Cuba, and some said were Americans from Arkansas, and some said had been usurers, and some gin-spinners, and some opium dealers, and some things even yet worse ; at any rate thej' had amassed, somehow or other, a great deal of money, and had therefore got into society by dint of a very large expenditure and the meekest endurance of insults ; and had made an ancient palace as gaudy and garish as any brand-new hotel at Nice or Scarboro', and gathered in it all the cosmopolitan crowd of IN A WINTER CITY. 1G7 Floralia ; some of the Italian planets and Mus- covite stars alone liancjinsj aloof in a loftier atmosphere, to the ver}'^ great anguish of the Joshua R. Postiches. The ball was to be a wonderful ball, and the co- tillon presents were whispered to have cost thu'ty thousand francs, and there were various rumom's of a "surprise" there would be at it, as poor Louis Napoleon used to promise the Parisians one for the New Year. Louis Napoleon's pro- mises always ended in smoke, but the surprise of the Joshua R. Postiches was always to be reckoned on as something excellent : — salmon come straight from the Scotch rivers ; lobsters stewed in tokay du krone ; French comic actors fetched from Paris ; some great singer, paid heaven knew what for merely opening her mouth ; some dove flying about with jewels in his beak for everybody, or something of that sort, which showed that the Joshua R. Postiches, wherever they had been "raised," or even if they had kept a drinking-bar and eating-shop in Havannah, as some people said, were at all events persons who knew the requirements of their own 1G8 IN A WINTER CITY. generation and the wa}' to mount into " La Haute." Wh}' the}'' wanted to get there no mortal coukl tell ; they had no children, and were hoth middle- aged ; but no doubt, if 3''ou have not been used to them, the cards of countesses are as balm in Gilead, and to see a fiishionable throng come up 3'our staircase is to have attained the height of human desire. At an}' rate, the Joshua JX. Postiches had set their souls on this sort of social success, and they achieved it ; receiving at their parties many distinguished and infinitely bored personages who had nothing to do in Floralia, and would have cut them in Paris, Vienna, or London, with the blandest and blankest stare of unconsciousness. Madame Mila was on the point of adding her- self to those personages. " I vmst go to the ball," she said. " Oh, it will be the best thing of the season except Nina Trasimene's — I must go to the ball — but then I can't endure to know the woman." *' Can't you go without knowing her ? " said the Ladv Hilda. " That has been done " IN A WINTER CITY. 169 Madame Mila did not feel the satire. "Yes; one could do it in Paris or London ; but not in a little place like this," she answered, innocently. " I must let them present her to me — and I must leave a card. That is what's so horrid. The woman is dreadful ; she murders all the languages, and the man's always looking about for a spittoon, and calls you my lad}'. They are too dreadful ! But I must go to the ball. Besides, our own people want jMaurice to lead the cotillon. Now Guido Salvareo is ill, there's nobody that can come near Maurice " "But 1 suppose he would not dare to go if you were not there ?" " Of course he would not go ; the idea ! But I mean to go — I must go. I'm only thinking how I can get out of knowing the woman after- wards. It's so difficult in a small place, and I am always so good-natured in those things. I sup- pose it's no use asking you to come, Hilda ? else, if you would, you could cut them afterwards most deliciously, and I should do as you did. Left to myself, I'm always too good-natured." 170 IN A WINTER CITY, "I would do most things to please j'ou, my dear Mila," answered her cousin, " but I don't think I can do that. You know it's my rule never to visit people that I won't let visit me — and I don't like murdered languages, and being called * my lady.' " " Oh, the people are horrid — I say so," an- swered the Comtesse. " I shall have nothing to do with them, of course — after their ball." *'But surely, it's very low, Mila, that sort of thing. I know people do it nowadaj's. But really, to be a guest of a person you intend to cut next day " ** What does it matter ? She wants my name on her list ; she gets it ; I'm not bound to give her anj^thing more. There is nothing unfair about it. Slie has what she wants, and more than she could expect. Of course, all that kind of persons must know perfectly well that we only go to them as we go to the opera, and have no more to do with them than we have with the opera door-keepers. Of course they know we don't visit them as we visit our own people. But if snobbish creatures like those find pleasure in en- IN A WINTER CITY. 171 tertaining us, thoiigli they know quite well what we think of them, and how we esteem them, and why we go to them — well, I don't see that they deserve anything better." " Nor I," said the Lady Hilda. '' Only I shouldn't go to them— that's all. And it is very funny, my love, that you, who have Hved in all the great courts of Europe, and have had your own Embassy in London, should care one straw for a ball at the Joshua R. Postiche's. Good gracious ! You must have seen about seventy thousand balls in your time ! " "I am only six years older than you, Hilda," said she, tartly. " I suppose you've been telling Delia Rocca not to go to the Postiche's — Olga and the Baroness and Madame Valley ria, and scores of them have been trymg to persuade him all the week, because if he stay away so many of the other men will ; and none of us can stir him an inch about it. * On pent etre de tres-braves gens — mais je n'y vais pas,' that is all he says; as if their being ' braves gens ' or not had any- thing to do with it ; and yet I saw him the other day with his hand on a contadino's shoulder in 172 IN A WINTER CITY. tlie market-place, and lie was calling him ' caris- simo mio.' " " One of liis own peasants, most likely," said the Lady Hilda, coldly. " I have never heard these Postiches even mentioned by M. Delia Piocca, and I certainly have nothing whatever to do with where he goes or doesn't go." *' He is always with yon, at any rate," said Ma- dame Mila; "and if you would make him go, it would only be kind of you. You see we want everybody we know, so that we may be sure to make the square dances only of our own people, and not to see anything of anybody the Postiches may have asked themselves. Little Dickie Dorrian, who's managing it all, said to the woman Pos- tiche, ' I'll bring the English division if you'll spend enough on the cotillon toys; but I won't undertake the Italians.' Now if Delia Pvocca " " Would you want a new dress, Mila ? " said the Lady Hilda ; " I am sure you must if you're going to a woman you can't know the next day." " I should like one, of course," said the Com- tesse, " but I've had thirty new ones this season IN A WINTER CITY. 173 already — and wliat I owe AVorth ! — not to talk of the Maison lloger " ** Let rae give you one," said the Lady Hilda. *' Worth will do anything at short notice for either of us ; and I must think this poor Postiche woman ought to see you in a new dress, as she's never to see 3'ou again." "You are a darling, Hilda!" said Madame Mila, with ardent effusion, rising to kiss her cousin. Lady Hilda turned to let the caress fall on the old guipure lace fichu round her throat, and drew her writing-things to her to pen a telegi'am to M. Worth. " I suppose you don't care to say what colour ? " she asked as she wrote. ** Oh no," answered the Comtesse. *' He remembers all the combinations I've had much better than I do. You dictate to him a little too much ; I've heard him say so " *' He never said so to me," said the Lady Hilda, with a laugli. " Of course I dictate to him. Whatever taste your di-ess-maker, man or woman, may have — and he has genius — there are 174 IN A WINTER CITY. little touches which should always come from oneself, and which can alone give originahty. That is why all that herd of women, who really do go to Worth hut yet are nobodies, look hardly the better for him ; he thinks about us, and we think about ourselves ; but he doesn't think about them, and as they have no thought themselves the result is that they all look as conventional and similar as if they were dolls dressed for a bazaar. Women ought to be educated to more sense of colour and form. Even an ugly woman ought to be taught that it is her duty to make her ugliness as little disagreeable as possible. If the eyes and the taste of women were cultivated by artistic study, an ill-dressed woman would be- come an impossibility. If I were ever so poor," continued the Lady Hilda impressively, " if I were ever so poor, and had to sew my own gowns, and make them of serge or of dimity, I would cut them so that Giorgione or Gainsborough, if they were living, would be able to look at me with complaisancy — or at all events without a shudder. It is not half so much a question of material as it is of taste. But nowadays the people who cannot IN A WINTER CITY. 175 afford material have no taste ; so that after us, and the women whom "Worth manages to make look decently in spite of themselves, there is nothing but a multitude of hideously-attired persons, who make the very streets appalling either by dreariness or gaudiness : — they never have any medium. Now a peasant gud of the Marche, or of the Agi'o Eomana, or of the Pays de Vaud, is charming, because her garments have beauty of hue in them, and that other beauty which comes from perfect suitability and Ah ! come sta Duca ? " She interrupted herself, and turned to Delia Eocca, who was standing behind her, the servant's announcement of him having been unheard : it was her day to receive. ** Oh, that the rest of yom* sex, Madame," he said, after his salutations were made, *' could sit at your feet and take in those words of wisdom ! Yes, I heard most that you said ; I can understand your tongue a little ; you are so right ; it is the duty of every woman to make herself as full of grace as she can ; all cannot be lovely, but none need be unlovely." 176 TN A WINTER CITY. " Exactly; women are reproached with thinking too much about dress, but the real truth is, tliey do not think enough about it — in the right way. They talk about it dreadfully, in the vulgarest fashion, but bring any thought to it they don't. Most women will wear anything if it be only de rigucur. I believe if I, and Princess Metternich, and Madame de Gallifet, and Madame Aguado, and a few like us wore that pea-green silk coat and Avaistcoat which the Advanced Thought Ladies of America are advocatmg as the best new kind of dress for women, that you would see ten thousand pea-green coats and waistcoats blazing in the streets the week afterwards " " Not a bad idea for the Cotton Costume ball," said Madame Mila. " I will have a pea-green coat and waistcoat, a tall hat, and hessians ; and call myself ' Advanced Thought.' " " To be completely in character, Mila, you must have blue spectacles, a penny whistle, a phial full of nostrums, a magpie for your emblem, and a calico banner, inscribed * Everything is Nothing ! ' " *' Charming ! It shall be the best thing there. IN A WINTER CITY. 177 Draw it for me, Delia Rocca, and I will send the sketch to Paris, so that it can all come in a box together, magpie and all." He drew a sheet of paper to him, and sketched the figure in ink, with spirit. " You have all the talents — so many thanks," said Madame Mila, looking over his shoulder. Delia Eocca sighed. " If I have them I have buried them, Madame — but, indeed, I can make no such claim." *' So many thanks," echoed the Comtesse. " Pray, don't say a word about it, or we shall have a dozen * Advanced Thoughts ' in calico. Hilda, I am just going to Nina's to see about the Muscadins. I have resolved Ave shall play that piece or no other. I shall be back in ten minutes, ask Olga to wait ; " and Madame Mila wafted herself out of the room, and downstairs to the courtyard, where the coupe and the exemplary Maurice were waiting. "How she does amuse herself!" said Lady Hilda, a little enviously. " I wish I could do it. What can it matter whether they play the Mus- cadins or anything else ! " 178 IN A WINTER CITY. "Plus on est fou, plus on rit," said Delia Eocca, sketching arabesques witli liis pen. " Nay, that is too impolite in me to charming Madame Mila. But, like aU old proverbs, it is more true than elegant." " Do you know, Madame," he continued, with a little hesitation, " I have often ventured to think that, despite your brilliancy, and your position, and all your enviable fate, you are not alto- gether — quite happy ? Am I right ? Or have I committed too great an impertinence to be answered?" " No impertinence whatever," said the Lady Hilda, a little wearily. " You may be right ; I don"t know ; I am not unhappy certainly ; I have nothing to be unhappy about ; but — most things seem very stupid to me. I confess Mila's endless diversions and excitements are quite beyond me. There is such a terrible sameness in everything." " Because you have no deeper interests," he answered her. He still sat near her at her writing-table beside the fire, and was playing with the little jewelled boy who held her pen-wiper. She did not answer him ; and he continued IN A WINTER CITY. 179 "I think you have said yourself, Madame, the cause why everything seems more or less wearisome to you — you have * nothing to he unhappy ahout' ; that is — you have no one for whom you care." He thought that her proud delicate face coloured a little ; or it might he the warmth from the fire of oak-logs and pine-cones. "No; I don't care ahout people," she an- swered him indifferently. " When you have seen a person a few times — it is enough. It is like a hook you have read through ; the interest is gone ; you know the mot cVenigme." " You speak of society ; I spoke of affec- tions." The Lady Hilda laughed a Uttle. " I can't foUow you. I do not feel them. I like Clairvaux, my brother, certainly, but we go years without seeing each other quite con- tentedly." '* I spoke of affections, other affections," re- plied Delia Eocca, with a little impatience. " There is nothing else that gives warmth or colour to life. Without them there is no glow N 2 180 IN A WINTER CITY. in its pictures, they are all painted en grisaille. Pleasure alone cannot content any one whose character has any force, or mind any high intel- ligence. Society is, as yon say, a hook we soon read through, and know hy heart till it loses all interest. Art alone cannot fill more than a cer- tain part of our emotions ; and culture, how- ever perfect, leaves us unsatisfied. There is only one thing that can give to life what 3-our poet called the light that never was on sea or land — and that is human love." His eyes rested on her ; and for once in her life her own eyes fell ; a troubled softness came for a moment on her face, dispersing all its languor and its coldness. In another moment she recovered herself, and smiled a little. "Ah! you are appassionatOy as becomes your country." Delia Eocca looked at her with something of disappointment and something of distaste ; he rose and approached the grand piano. "You allow me?" he said, and touched a few of the chords. He sang very low, and almost as it were to himself, a canzone of the people — IN A WINTER CITY. 181 " Si tu mi lasci, lasciar non ti voglio, Se m' abbandoni, ti vo seguitare Se passi 11 mare, il mar passare io voglio, Se giii il moudo, 11 mondo ro' giiare," &c. The words were very simple, but the melody was passionate and beautiful ; his voice, so low at first, rose louder, with all the yearning tender- ness in it with which the song is laden ; and the soft sounds echoed through the silent room, as they had echoed ten thousand times in moonlit nights of midsummer, over the land where Romeo and Stradella and Ariosto loved. Ilis voice sank softly into silence ; and Lady Hilda did not move. There was a mist that was almost like tears in her proud eyes ; she gazed into the fire, Avith her cheek leaning on her hand ; she did not speak to him ; there was no sound but the falling of some burning wood upon the hearth. ** The simplest contadina in the land would understand that," he said as he rose ; " and you, great lady though you are, cannot ? Madame, there are things, after all, that you have missed." 182 IN A WINTER CITY. " Go back and sing again," she said to liim, taking no notice of his words; "I did not know you ever sang " "Every Italian does; — or well or ill," he an- swered her. " We are born with music in us, like the birds." " But in society who hears you ? " " No one. An atmosiohere of gas, candles, ennui, perfume, heat, and inane flatteries ! ah no, Madame — music is meant for silence, moon- light, vinepaths, summer nights " " This is winter and firelight, a few arm- chairs and a great deal of street noise ; all the same, go back and sing me more." She spoke indifferently and lightly, leaning her hand back on her chair, and hiding a little 3'awn with her hand ; she would not have him see that he had touched her to any foolish, momentary wealmess. But he had seen. He smiled a little. " As you command," he answered, and he went back and made her music as she wished ; short love lyrics of the populace, sonnets set to noble airs, wild mournful boat-songs, and IN A WINTER CITY. 183 snatches of soft melodies, such as echo all the harvest- time through the fire%-lightecl corn : things all familiar to him from his infanc}', hut to her unlaiown, and full of the force and the yearning of the passion which was un- known to her also, and in a certain way derided by her. He broke off abruptly, and came and leaned on the cliimney-piece near her, with his arm amongst the little pug-dogs in Saxe, and figures and fountains in Capo di Monte, which she had collected in a few weeks from the bric-a-brac j)eople. He did not speak ; he onl}'' looked at her where she sat, with the fireHght and the dymg daylight on the silver fox-furs fringing her dress, on the repousse gold and silver work of her loose girdle, on the ends of the old Spanish lace about her throat ; on the great rings that si^arlded on her white fingers, which were Ij^ng so idly clasped together on her lap. ** You sing very beautifully," she said, calmly, at length, with her eyes half closed and her head lying back on the chair-cushions. " It 184 IN A WINTER CITY. is veiy strange you should be so mute in society." " I never sang to a crowd in my life, and never Avould. Music is an impulse, or it is nothing. I could never sing save to some woman who " He j)aused a moment. " Who was music in herself," he added with a smile; it was not what had been upon his lips. " Then you should not have sung to me," she said, still with half- closed eyes and a careless coldness in her voice. " I am all discord ; have you not found that out ? — every woman is, now- a-days ; we have lost the secret of harmony ; we are always wanting to be excited, and never succeeding in being anything but bored." " These are mere words, Madame," he an- swered her, " I hope they are not true. By discord I think you only mean inconsistency. Pardon me — but I think you are all so wearied because of the monotony of your lives. I dare say that sounds very strangely to you, because you pursue all the pleasures and all the cx- IN A WINTER CITY. 185 tnivaganccs that are obtainable. But then all these are no novelties, they are merely habits. Habit is nothing better than a harness ; even when it is one silvered and belled. You have exhausted everything too early ; how can it have flavour ? You pursue an unvarying routine of amusement : how can it amuse ? The life of the great world is, after all, when we once know it well, as tii-esome as the life of the peasant — perhaps more so. I know both." "All that may be right enough," said the Lady Hilda, " but there is no helj) for it that I see. If the world is not amusing, that is not our fault. In the Beau Siecle, perhaps, or in Augustan Rome — " "Be very sure it was the same thing. An artificial life must grow tiresome to any one with a mind above that of a parrot or a monkey. If we can be content with it, we deserve nothing better. AVhat you call your discord is nothing but your dissatisfaction — the highest part of you. If it were not treason to say so, treason against this exquisite apparel, I would sa}- that you would be more likely to know happiness 186 IN A WINTER CITY. were you condemned to the serge and the dimity YOU spoke of to Madame Mila an hour ago." He had sunk on a stool at her feet as he spoke, and caressed the silver fox and the gold girdle lightly; his hand touched hers in passing, and her face greAv warm. She put a feather screen between her and the fire. ''That is the old argument of content in the cottage &c.," she said, with a sHght laugh. "I do not believe in it in the least. If it be ' best repenting in a coach and six ' it must be best to be bored in an arm-chair " " Perhaps ! It is not I, certainly, who should praise poverty ! " he said, with some bitterness, and more sadness; "and, indeed, poverty or riches has little to do with the question of happiness ; happiness can come but from one tiling ." " A good conscience ? How terribly moral you are. "No : — from our emotions, from our passions, from our sympathies ; in fine, from Love." His hand still played with the gold g3'psire of the girdle as he sat at her feet ; his eyes were IN A WINTER CITY. 187 lifted to lier face ; his voice was very low ; in all his attitude and action and regard there were an unuttered sohcitation, an eloquence of unspoken meaning ; she was silent : — then the door opened ; he dropped the gndle, and rose to his feet ; there came a patter of high heels, and a chime of swift aristocratic voices ; and into the room there entered the Princess Olga, attended by her con- stant shadow, Don Carlo Maremma, with Lady Featherleigh behind her, accompanied by her attendant, Prince Nicolas Doggondorf. "Ma chere, there is a regular riot going on at Nina's," said the Princess Olga, advancing with both hands outstretched. "All about those Muscaclins. Mila has seceded in full form, and, of course, M. des Gommeux with her. Blanche will only play if they have 'II faut qu'iuic 2)orte,' &c., which is as old as the hills, and Mila won't play at all if Blanche be allowed to play anything. They have quarrelled for hfe, so have Mila and Nina. They are slanging each other like two street boys. Alberto Eimini is on his knees between them, and the Due is declarmg for the five thousandth time that it is 188 IN A WINTER CITY. the last he will ever have to do with theatricals. I left while I could escape with life. AVhat a pity it is that plaj'ing for charity always developed such fierce hostilities. Well, Paolo, — have you thought better of the Postiche ball ? No ? Hoav stiff-necked you are ! I do believe Carlo wdll be the only Italian there ! " " It will be a distinction to inscribe on his tombstone, Madame," said Delia Kocea. " But then he goes under command ." "And under jn'otest," murmured Don Carlo. " Which does not count. When one is no longer a free agent " Princess Olga hit him a little blow with her muff. " But why should you not go to the Postiches ? Just as you go to the Veglione ; it is nothing more." " Madame, — I am very old-fashioned in my ideas, I dare say, but I confess I think that no one should accept as a host a person he Avould never accept as his guest. I may be wrong " ** Of course you are wrong. That is not tlie question at all," said Princess Olga, who did IN A WINTER CITY. 189 not like people to differ with lier. "Joshua R. Posticlie will never dream of being asked to shoot your wild ducks or your partridges. All he wants is that you should just be seen going up his staircase, and drinking his champagne. Society is full of Postiches : low people, with a craze for entertaining high people. They don't care how we insult them, nor how we laugh at them, provided our cards lie in the bowl in their hall. We take them at their own valuation, and treat them as we treat the waiters at Spillman's or Doney's ; we have paid the bill with our cards." " That is to say, we have paid with our names — which should represent all the honour, dignity, and self-resi^ect that we have inherited, and are bound to maintain, for our own sakes and for those who may come after us." " Oh, mon Dieu, quel grand serieux!" cried the Princess, impatiently. " But, of course, if you've been sitting with Hilda you have got more stiff-necked than ever. What do you say, Hilda? Isn't it ill-natured of him? He need only walk in, bow once to the woman, and look on at the edge of the ball-room for twenty 190 IN A WINTER CITY. minutes. The other men will go if he will do as much as that." "I think M. clella Rocca quite right not *to do as much as that,' " said the Lady Hilda. ** Why- Society ever does as much as that, or half as much, or anything at all, for Joshua R. Postiche, I can never tell. As it does, — to be consistent everybody should dine with the fruit woman from the street corner, and play ecarte with their own chimney sweeps." ** Oh, we shall come to that, Madame," said Nicolas Doggondorf. **At least, if chimney sweeping ever make heaps of money; I don't think it does ; it only chokes little boys ." " Ce bon Monsieur Postiche sold rum and molasses," murmured Don Carlo. "What's it to us what he sold?" said Lady Featherleigh. "We've nothing to do with him; we're only going to his ball. You talk as if we asked the man to dinner." " What does the Archduchess Anna alwaj's say : ' On je m'amuse — j'y vais.' So we do all. I hear he has been put up for the Club ; is it true ? " added the Princess to Carlo Maremma. iiV A WINTER CITY. 191 "Yes, Krunensberg has put him up," he answered her, "hut he shall never get mto it, while there are any of us ahve." "Et s'il n'y a qu'un, moi je serai celui-la," quoted Delia Eocca. " But he has lent Krunensberg heaven knows what — some say two million francs," said Lady Featherleigh. Prince Krunensberg was a great personage, and, for a foreigner, of great influence in the Club. " Chere dame," said Delia Eocca, " if we elect all Krunensberg's creditors we shall have to cover three streets with our club-house ! " "Oh my dear! I am half dead!" cried Madame Mila, flashing into the room, gorgeous in the feathers of the golden pheasant, arranged on the most exquisite combination of violet satin, and bronze velvet, and throwing her mufl" on one side of her and her parasol on the other, while Maurice des Gommeux, who was the most admirable of upper servants, stooped for them and smoothed their ruffled elegance. " I am half dead ! Such a scene I never went through in my life. I, who 192 IN A WINTER CITY. hate scenes, and never have any hardl}' even with Spiridion ! Oh, has Olga told j^ou ? Yes ; it is horrible, mfamous, intolerable ! — after all I have done for that odious Dumb Asylum — and my costumes ordered for the Miiscadlns, and half the part learnt ! It is all Krunensberg's doing — and the Due didn't stand out one half as he should have done ; and Blanche ! — the idea — the little wretch is made of wood, and can't even open her mouth ! As for Krunens- berg, he deserves to be shot ! It is all his in- fluence that has set Nina against the Muscadins — ^just to spite me ! What I have gone through about this wretched theatre — and then to have that little chit of a Blanche set over my head, a little creature, only married out of her convent last year ; — it is unbearable ; of course, neither I nor des Gommeux shall play. Oh, here comes the Due ; — no, Due, it is not the shghtest use ! If you have that ridiculous musty old piece of De Musset's, or if you have Blanche in it at all you don't have Me in anything. A nice morn- ing's work you have made of it ! Nina and I shall never speak A?ain." IN A WINTER CITY 193 The Due laid his hat aside ; his delicate fea- tures were puckered, weary, and troubled. *' Mais, Madame, pardon ! — mais vous avez toutes dit les choses les plus affreuses ! " " Women always do, Due, when they are in a passion," said Lady Hilda. " There is nothing like a scene for discovering our real opinions of one another. Why ! you look actually — worried ! I thought nothing ever ruffled you by any chance whatever." *' Madame," said M. de St. Louis, stretching himself, with a sigh, in a low chair beside her and the fire, ''I have always sedulously cultivated serenity. I believe serenity to be the whole secret of human health, hapjiiness, longevity, good taste, sound judgment, everything in point of fact that is desirable in the life of a human being. But, alas ! we are all mortal, and our best plans are but finite. In an evil moment, when Pan- dora's box was packed, there was put in with it by the malice of Mercury a detonating powder, called Amateur Pdvaky. When all the other discords were dispersed, this shot itself into the loveliest forms and the gentlest bosoms: and ( 194 IN A WINTER CITY. where it explodes — the wisest man stands help- less. He cannot reconcile the warring elements nor retain any personal peace himself. I am the slave of Madame Mila ; I adore the dust of the exquisite shoes of Madame Nma ; I am penetrated with the most absolute devotion to Madame Blanche ; — when these heavenly graces are ready to rend each other's hair, what can I do ? What can I he except the most unhappy person upon earth ? To reconcile ladies who are infuriated is a hopeless dream ; it were easier to make whole again a broken glass of Venice. It makes one almost wish," added the Due with a second sigh, " almost wish that Moliere had never been created, or, being created, had never written. But for Moliere I doubt very much if the Drama, as an tVrt, would have Imgered on to the present time." *' Console yourself, my dear Due," said Lady Hilda, " console yourself with a line from Moliere : ' Cinq ou six coups do baton entre gens qui s'aimcnt ne font que ragaillardir I'amitie.* Mila, Nina, and Blanche will kiss each other to-morrow ; they must, or what becomes of the IN A [VINTEB CITY. 195 great Contes de Mere cl'Oie Quadrille to open the Eoubleskoff ball next week ? " " I shall never speak to either of them as long as I live," said Madame Mila, still ruffling all her golden feathers in highest wrath. " As for the quadrille — the Eoubleskoff must do as they can. I do think Krunensberg has made Nina perfectly odious ; I never saw anybody so altered by a man in my life. Well, there's one thmg, it won't last. His ' affau's ' never do." *' It will last as long as her jewels do," said Carlo Maremma. *' Oh, no, he can't be quite so bad as that." " Foi d'honneur ! — since he left the Sant' An- selmo you have never seen her family diamonds except in the Paris paste replica, which she tells you she wears for safety, and because it is such a bore to have to employ policemen in plain clothes at the balls " " Talk of policemen ! " said Madame Mila, " they say we're to have a caution sent us from the Prefectm'e about our playing baccarat the other night at the cafe — they say no gambling is allowed in the city — the idea ! " 2 196 IN A WINTER CITY. " While the State organises the lotteries !^ how very consistent," said the Lady Hilda. " All your gaming is against the law, angels of my soul," said Carlo Maremma. " Then we'll all leave Floralia," said Madame Mila. " The idea of not being able to do what one chooses in one's own rooms ! — there is one thing, we can always go up to Roubleskoff's ; — they will never dare to caution him. But what is the use of all this fuss ? — everybody plays — everybody always will pla}'." " The Prefect is much too wise a man ever to imagine he can prevent ladies domg what they like," said Maremma. "It is those tremendous losses of young De Fabris the other night that have made a stir, and the Prefect thinks it ne- cessary to say something; he is afraid of a scandal." *' Good gracious ! As if anything filled a city haK so weU as a scandal ! Why don't Floraha have a good gaming place like Monte Carlo ? we shouldn't want to use our own rooms then " "I confess," said the Due, in his gentle, medi- IN A WINTER CITY. 197 tative voice, " I confess that, like Milacli here, I fail to altogether appreciate the moral horror of a game at baccarat entertained by a municipaUty "which in its legislation legalises the lottery. All gaming may be prejudicial to the moral health of mankind; it is certainly so to their purses. I am prepared to admit, even in face of Madame Mila's direst wrath, that all forms of hazard are exceedingly injurious to the character and to the fortunes of ever}' person tempted by them. It may be impossible even to exaggerate their bane- ful influences or their disastrous consequences. But how can a government which publicly patronizes, sustains, and emiches itself by lotteries, have any logic in condemning the pastime of hazard in a private drawing-room or a private club-liouse ? I confess I cannot see how they reconcile both courses. A govern- ment, whatever it be, should never be an anomaly." " Lotteries are to us what bull-fighting is to Spaniards, and revolutions are to the French," said Carlo Maremma. "Every nation has its especial craze. The lottery is ours." 198 IN A WINTER CITY. ''But is it for a government to intensify and pander to, and profit by a national insanity ? " said Delia Eoccawith much seriousness. "When Rome bent to the yeU of Panem et Circences, the days of her greatness were numbered. Besides, the Due is quite right — it is a ridiculous anomaly to condemn games while you allow lot- teries. Great harm may result from private gambling — greater still from the public gaming- tables — but the evil after all is not a millionth part so terrible as the evil resulting from the system of public lotteries. The persons who are ruined by ordinary gaming, are, after all, persons who would certainly be ruined by some vice or another. The compound of avarice and excite- ment which makes the attraction of hazard does not allure the higher kinds of character ; besides, the vice does not go to the player — the player goes to the vice. Now, on the contrary, the lottery attacks ojienly, and tries to allure in very despite of themselves the much wider multitude that is the very sap and support of a nation — it entices the people themselves. It lures the workman to tlirow away his wage — IN A WINTER CITY. 199 the student to spend his time in feverish dreams — the simple daydabourer to consume his con- tent in senseless calculations that often bring his poor empty brain, to madness. The lottery- assails them in the street, is carried to them in their homes, drops them some poor prize at first to chain them in torment for ever afterwards. It changes honesty to cunning, peace to burning desire, industry to a perpetual waiting upon chance, manly effort to an imbecile abandonment to the dictates of signs and portents, and the ex- pectancy of a fortune which never comes. High- born gamblers are only the topmost leaves of the tree of the State ; they may rot away without detriment to the tree, but the lottery lays the axe to the very trunk and root of it, because it demo- ralises the people." Lady Hilda listened, and watched: him as he spoke with a grave and almost tender meditation in her eyes ; which M. de St. Louis saw, and seeing, smiled. " Say all that in the Chamber, caro mio," mut- tered Carlo Maremma. " I would go to the Chambers to say it, or to 200 IN A WINTER CITY. worse places even, were there any chance it would be attended to. Madame Mila, have I been so unhappy as to have offended you ? " ** I am a top leaf that may rot ! I was never told anything so rude in my life — from you too ! the very soul of ceremonious courtesy." Delia Rocca made his peace with her in flowery flattery. " Well, I shall play baccarat to-night in this hotel, just because the Prefect has been so odious and done that," said Madame Mila. " You will all come home with me after the Eoubleskoff's dinner ? Promise ! " ** Of course," said the Princess Olga. *' Of com'se," said Lady Featherleigh. ** Of course," said everybody else. "And if the gendarmes come in? " " We will shoot them ! " ** No ; we will give them champagne — surer and more humane." " I wish the Prefect would come himself — I should hke to tell him my mind," continued Ma- dame Mila. " So impudent of the man ! — when all the Eoyal Highnesses and Grand Dukes and IN A WINTER CITY. 201 Duchesses in Europe only come to winter cities for play. He must know that." " My dear Mila, how you do put yourself out about it," said the Lady Hilda. " Send ten thousand francs to the public charities — you may I)lay all night long in the cafes then." " Madame, j'ai I'honneur de vous saluer," mur- mured Delia Rocca, bending low before her. When the door had closed upon him and left the others behind, a sudden blankness and dull- ness seemed to fall on her : she had never felt the same thing before. Bored she had often been, but this was not ennui, it was a kind of loneli- ness — it was as if all about her grew grey and cold and stupid. More ladies came in, there were endless laughter and chatter; Princess Olga wanted some tea, and had it ; the other women cracked bon- bons with their little teeth like pretty squirrels cracking fir-cones ; they made charming groups in the firelight and lamplight ; they made plans for a hundred diversions; they were full of the gayest of scandals ; they dissected in the most merciless manner all their absent friends ; they 202 IN A WINTER CITY. scolded their lovers and gave tliem a thousand contradictory orders ; tliey discussed all tlie news and all the topics of the day, and arranged for dinner parties, and driving parties, and costume quadrilles, and hazaar stalls, and boxes at the theatre, and suppers at the cafes; and agreed that everything was as dull as ditchwater, and yet that they never had a minute for anything ; and the Lad}^ Hilda with the jubilant noise and the twittering laughter round her, thought how silly they all were, and what a nuisance it was having a day — only if one hadn't a day it was worse still, because then thej^ were alwaj'S trying to run in at all hours on every day, and one was never free for a moment. ** Thank goodness, they are gone ! " she said, half aloud, to the Saxe cups and the Capo di Monte children on the mantelpiece, when the last flutter of fur and velvet had vanished through the door, and the last of those dearest friends and born foes had kissed each other and sei^a- rated. Left alone, she stood tliinking, by the fire, with nil the lights burning behind her in that IN A WINTER CITY. 203 big, empty room. What slie thought was a very humble and pensive thought for so disdainful a lad}'. It was only " Is it myself ? or onlj^ the money ? " She stood some time there, motionless, her hand playing with the gold girdle as his hand had done ; her face was pale, softened, troubled. The clock amongst the Saxe dogs and the Capo di Monte little figures chimed the half- hour after six. She started as it struck, and remembered that she was to dine at eight with the Princess Roubleskoflf; a big party for an EngUsh royalty on his travels. " Anjdiow, it would be of no use," she said to herself. " Even if I did wish it, it could never be." And she was angry with herself, as she had been the night before; she was impatient of these new weaknesses which haunted her. Nevertheless she was more particular about her appearance that night than her maids had ever known her be ; she was very difficult to satisfy ; tried and discarded four wholl}^ new confections of her friend Worth's, miracles of invention and of 204 IN A WINTER CITY. costliness, and at length had herself dressed quite simply in black velvet, only reheved by all her diamonds. *' He said fair women should always wear black," she thought: it was not her Magister of Paris of whom she was thinking as the sayer of that wise phrase. And then again she was angry with herself for remembering such a thing, and attiring herself in obedience to it, and would have had herself undrest again only there was but one small quarter of an hour in which to reach the Roubleskoff villa ; a palace of the fairies four miles from the south-gate. So she went as she was; casting a dubious impatient glance behind her at the mirrors. " I look well," she thought with a smile, and her content returned. She knew that he would be present at the dinner. There is no escaping destiny in Flora- lia : people meet too often. The dinner disappointed her. She thought it very long and very stupid. She sat between the Grand Duke of Ivittersbiihn and the Envoy of all the Eussias, and Delia IN A WINTER CITY. 205 Zlocca was not placed -within her sight; and after the dinner the young English Prince would talk to no one but herself, delightedly recalling to her how often she had howled his wickets down when they had been young children playing on the lawns at Osborne. She felt disloyally thankless for his preference. He monopolised her. And as the rooms filled with the crowd of the reception she merely saw the delicate dark head of Delia Eocca afar off, bent down in eager and possibly tender conversation with his beautifid country- woman, the Duchess Medici-Malatesta. She felt angered and impatient. If she had sat alone and neglected, as less lovely women often do, instead of being monopolised by a prince, with twenty other men sighing to take his place when etiquette should permit them, she could scarcely have been more ill-content. Never in all her life had it befallen her to think angrily of another woman's beauty ; and now she caught herself irritatedly connmg, across the width of the room, the classic profile and the immense 206 IN A WINTER CITY. jewel-like eyes of the Malatesta Semii-amis. Never iii all her life had it happened to her to miss any one thing that she desii'ed, and now a strange sense of lonelmess and emptiness came upon her, unreasoned and unreasoning; and she had such an impatience and contempt of herself too all the while ! — that was the most bitter part of it. After all it was too absurd, As soon as the departure of the royal guests permitted anyone to leave, she went awaj^, con- temptuous, ill at ease, and out of temper with herself and all the world; half ignorant of what moved her, and half unwilling to probe her own emotions further. " Plus on est fou, plus on rit," she murmured to her pillow two hom^s later with irritable disdain, as she heard the voices of Mme. Mila and her troop noisily passing her door as they retm'ned to their night-long baccarat, which was to be doubly delightful because of the Prefect's interdict. " I wish I had been born an idiot ! " thought the Lady Hilda — as, indeed, any one must do IN A WINTER CITY. 207 who finds himself burdened witli aching brams in this best of all possible worlds. "Perhaps, after all, you were right,^' said the Due de St. Louis, driving back into the town with Delia Eocca that night. "Perhaps you were right. INIiladi is most lovely, most exquisite, most perfect. But she has caprices — there is no denying that she has caprices and extravagancies which would ruin any one short of the despotic sovereign of a very wealthy nation." The Due was a very wise man, and knew that the escalier derobe is the only way that leads in conversation to any direct mformation. Their demeanour had puzzled him, and he spoke ac- cordingly with shrewd design. Delia Rocca heard him with a little annoy- ance. " She has not more caprices than other wo- men that I know of," he answered. " Her faults are the faults rather of her monde than of her- self." " But she has adopted them with much affec- tion ! " " Tliey are habits — liardty more.' » 208 IN A WINTER CITY. " And you were correct too in your diagnosis when you saw her first," continued the Due, piti- lessly. " To me she is most amiable always ; but to the generality of people, it must be ad- mitted that she is not so amiable." *' The amiabihty of most women," replied Delia Rocca, **is nothing more than that insa- tiate passion for admiration which makes them show their persons almost nude at Trouville, and copy the ways and manners oifemmes entretenues in the endeavour to rival such with us. If they wish to be decent, they do not dare to be ; they must be popular and cJiic before all." " You are severe, but perhaps you are right. Miladi is certainly above all such vulgarities. Indeed, she is only a little too much above every- tliing— " " It is better than to be below everything — even below our respect — as most of our great ladies are/' ** Certainly. StiU she is a little — a little selfish." ** How should she be otherwise ? She is quite alone — she has no one to care for " IN A WINTER CITY. 209 " Most, women make something to care for ; she has many family ties, if she cared for them — but she does not. No ; she is beautiful, charm- ing, gniiulc dame en tout — ^but I begin to think that it is well for the peace of mankind that she remains so invulnerable. She would pro- babl}' make any man who loved her very un- happy if she married him." ** If he were a weak man, not otherwise." " Pouf ! Do you think any man would ever have control over Jier ? " " I am quite sure that she would never care for any man who had not." '' He would be a very bold person," murmured the Due. " However, I am very glad that you think more highly of her. You know, mon cher, what always was my opinion as to yourself " Delia Piocca coloured, and saw too late that his companion had forced his card from his hands in the most adroit manner. He busied himself with lighting a cigar. "For myself," he said, coldly, " I can have no bject in what I say. My own poverty is barrier sufficient. But I should be unjust not to admit 210 IN A WINTER CITY. ■what I think of her, as a frie],id. I helieve that the habits of the world are not so strong with her that they can satisf}' her ; and I believe that with her affections touched, with tenderer ties than she has ever known, with a home, with children, with a woman's natm'al life, in fact, she would be a much happier and very different person. Mais tout cela ne me regarde pas." The Due glanced at him and laughed softly, with much amusement. '* Ca vous regarde de bien i)res — bon succss et bon soir! " he said, as he got out of the carriage at his hotel in the city. "I told him to marry her," he thought ; " but if he expect to convert her too, he must be the boldest and most sanguine man in Europe." Lady Hilda made up her mind tliat she was tired of Floralia, as she meditated over her choco- late the next morning, after a night which chloral had made pretty passable, only the baccarat people had screamed so loudly with laughter on the other side of the corridor, that they had awakened her once or twice. Yes, she certainly was tired of it. The town was charming, — but IN A WINDER CITY. 211 then one couldn't live on pictures, marbles, and recollections, and one got so sick of seeing the same people morning, noon, and night. The fogs were very had. The drainage was dreadful. The thermometer was very nearly what it was in Normandy or Northamptonshire for what she could see. If one did take the trouble to go into society, one might as well do it all for a big world and not a little one. It was utter non- sense about her lungs in Paris. She would go back. She would telegraph her return to Hubert. Hubert was her mattre d'hotel. She did telegraph, and told herself that she would find immense interest in the fresco paint- ings which were being executed in the ball-room of that very exquisite hotel " entre cour et jardin," which she had deserted in Paris, and in making nooks and corners in her already over- filled tables and cabinets for the tazze and bacini and ivories and goldsmith's work she had col- lected in the last two months ; and decided that the wall decorations of the drawing-rooms, which were of rose satm, with Louis Quinze j^anelling, p 2 212 IN A WINTER CITY. were nil very barbarous, utterly incorrect, and should never have been borne with so long, and should be altered at once ; the palest amber satin was the only possible thing, with silver mirrors and silver cornices, and not a touch of gilding anywhere ; the idea had occurred to her before a picture in the galleries, where a silver casket was painted against an amber curtain ; she would have it done immediately, and she would go back to Paris and have her old Thursday evenings again. After all, Paris was the only place worth living in, and doctors were always alarmists — old women — ever3'thing that was stupid, unless you were very very ill, when they did seem to dilate into demi-gods, because of coui"se you were weakened with morphine and other stuif, and did not want to die ; though you ought to want to die, being a Christian, if you were in the very least degree consistent ; since if you were quite sure that the next world would be so very much better than this, it was utterly illogical to be afraid of going to it : — but then were you quite sure ? The Lady Hilda sighed. This dreadful age, j^N A WINTER CITY. 213 which has produced communists, i^etroleuses, and liberal thinkers, had communicated its vague restlessness even to her ; although she belonged to that higher region where nobody ever thinks at all, and everybody is more or less devout in seeming at any rate, because disbelief is vulgar, and religion is an ' affaire des moeurs,' like de- cency, still the subtle philosophies and sad negations which have always been afloat in the air since Voltaire set them flying, had affected her slightly. She was a true believer, just as she was a well- dressed woman, and had her creeds just as she had her bath in the morning, as a matter of course. Still, when she did come to think of it, she was not so very sure. There was another world, and saints and angels and eternity, yes, of course, — but how on earth would all those baccarat people ever fit into it ? Who could, by any stretch of imagination, conceive Madame ]Mila and Maurice des Gommeux in a spiritual existence around the throne of Deity ? And as for punishment and torment and all that other side of futurity, who could even think 214 IN A WINTER CITY. of the mildest purgatory as suitable to those poor flippertygibbet inanities who broke the seventh commandment as gaily as a child breaks his indiarubber ball, and were as in- capable of passion and crime as they were incapable of heroism and virtue '? There might be paradise for virtue, and hell for crime, but what in the name of the universe was to be done with creatures that were only all Folly? Perliaps they would be always flying about like the souls Virgil speaks of, " suspenses ad ventos," to purify themselves ; as the sails of a ship spread out to dr}^ The Huron Indians pray to the souls of the fish the}" catch ;- well, wh}- should they not ? a fish has a soul if Modern Society has one ; one could conceive a fish going softly through shining waters forever and forever in the ecstacy of motion ; but who could conceive Modern Society in the spheres ? AVandering thus from her drawing-room furni- ture to problems of eternity, and only succeeding in making herself unsettled and uncomfortable, the Lady Hilda, out of tune with everything, put oif her cashmere dressing-gown, had herself IN A WINTER CITY. 215 ■u'rapped in her sables, and tliought she would go out ; — it was just twelve o'clock. Looking out of the window she saw a lady all sables like herself, going also out of the hotel to a coupe, the image of her own. "Who is that?" she asked of her favourite maid. " That is Mdlle. Lea, Miladi," said the maid. " She came last night. She has the suite above." ' ' How dare you mention her ? " said the Lady Hilda. The little accident filled up the measure of her disgust. Mdlle. Jenny Lea was a young lady who had seduced the affections of an Emperor, three archdukes, and an untold number of the nobility of all nations ; she was utterly uneducated, in- conceivably coarse, and had first emerged from a small drinking shop in the dens of Whitechapel ; she was the rage of the moment, having got a needy literary hack to write her autobiography, which she published m her own name, as " Aventures d'une Anglaise ; " the book had no decency, and as little wit, but it professed to show 216 IN A WINTER CITY. up the scandals of a great Court, and it made some great men ridiculous and worse, so eighty thousand copies of it had heen sold over Europe, and great ladies leaned from their carriages ea.^er to see Mdlle. Jenny Lea pass by them. Mdlle. Jenny Lea, indeed, having put the finish- ing stroke to her popularity by immense debts and a forced sale of her effects m Paris, was the sensa- tion of the hour, only sharing public attention with thePere Hilarion, a young and passionately^ earnest Dominican, who was making a crusade against the world, in a noble and entirely' vain fervour, from the pulpits of all the greatest churches on the Continent. It was " the thing " to go and hear Pere Hilarion, weep with him and pra}- with him, and then coming out of the church doors to read Jenny Lea and talk of her. It is by these admir- able mixtures that Society manages to keep itself alive. The Pere Hilarion was breaking his great heart over the vileness and the hopelessness of it all, as anyone who has any soul in him must be dis- posed to do. But to Society the Pere Hilarion was only a sort of mental liqueur, as Jenny Lea IN A WINTER CITY. 217 was an American " pick-me-up : " — that was all. Society took them indifferently^ one after the other. Of the two, of com-se it preferred Jenny Lea. The Lady Hilda in supreme disgust went out in her sables, as Mdlle. Jenny Lea in hers drove from the door. *' What good things sumptuary laws must have been," she thought. " If such creatures had to dress all in yellow now, as I think they had once (or was it Jews ?), who would talk of them, who would look at them, who would lose money about them ? Not a soul. And to think that there have been eighty thousand people who have bought her book ! " " Has anything offended you, Madame ? AVho or what is so unhappy?" said the voice of Delia Rocca, as she crossed the pavement of the court between the lines of bowing hotel functionaries, who had bent their spines double in just the same way to ]\Idlle. Lea three minutes previously. " Nothing in especial," she answered him, coldly. " Those baccarat people kept me awake half the niglit ; I wish the gendarmes had inter- fered. What wretched weather it is ! " 218 IN A WINTER CITY. *' It is a little cold ; but it is very bright," said Delia Eocca, in some surprise, for the day, indeed, was magnificent and seasonable. " I Avas coming in the hope that I might be admitted, though I know it is too early, and not your day, and everything that it ought not to be. But I was so unfortunate last night ; you were so mono- polised " She deigned to smile a little, but she continued to move to her brougham. " Your climate is the very Harpagonof climates. I have not seen one warm day yet. I am thinking of returning to Paris." He grew verj' pale. "Is not that very sudden?" he asked her; there was a great change in his voice. " Oh, no ; I have my house there, as you know, and Monsieur Odissot is painting the ball-room in frescoes. I have quite a new idea for my drawing-rooms, too; after all, furnishiug is one of the fine arts; do you like that young Odissot's talent? His drawing is perfection; he was a pupil of Hippol^^te Flandrin. Good morning." IN A WINTER CITY. 219 She was iu her coupe by this time, and he was obliged to close the door on her; but he kept his' hand upon it. " Since you are leaving us so soon and so cruelly, Madame, would you honour my own old chapel frescoes as you promised ? — they might give you some ideas for your ball-room." Lady Hilda deigned to smile fairly and fully this time. " Is that a satii'e or a profanity — or both together?" "It is jealousy of Camille Odissot ! I will go to Paris and paint your frescoes, Madame, if 3'ou will let me ; I can paint in fresco and in tempera; I was a student iii the Academy of San Luca in my time." His words were light, and his manner also, but his eyes had a language that made the Lady Hilda colour a little and look out of the other window of her coupe. "I must first call upon Olga; I have pro- mised," she answered, irrelevantly. " But I will join you at your palace in an hour ; perhaps she will come with r^e ; I should not like to leave, 220 IN A WINTER CITY. certainly, without having seen your chapel. Au revoir." " If you do leave, Madame, I follow ! — to paint the ball-room." He shut the carriage -do or, and stood hare- headed in the wintr}^ wind as the impatient horses dashed away. AVhen it had disappeared he put his hat on, lighted a cigar, and strolled to his own house. ** She will not go to Paris," he said to himself. He knew women well. In an hour and a half she arrived at his own gates, bringing the Princess Olga with her. She saw the grand old garden, the mighty staircases, the courts that once held troops of armed men ; she saw his own rooms, with their tapestries that Flemish John Posts had had the domg of so many centuries before ; she saw the exquisite dim silent chapel, whose walls, painted by the Memmi in one portion and continued by Masaccio, were amongst the famous things of the city. She was moved and saddened ; softened too ; after all, the decay of a great race has an un- ulterable pathos; it will touch even a vulgar mind; IN A WINTER CITY. 221 S'le, arrogant and fastidious as to bii'th, as though slie had been born before the '89, was touched by it to the core. She had heard, too, of how he lived ; without debt, yet with dignit}', with the utmost simplicity and without reproach ; there was something in his fortunes which seemed to her worthier than all distinction and success, something that stirred that more poetic side of her nature, which the world had never allowed to awake, but which had been born with her nevertheless. She was serious and dreaming as she lingered in the beau- tiful old chapel, under whose mosaic pavement there lay the dust of so many generations of his race. He noticed her silence and thought to himself : " Perhaps she is tliinking how base it is in a man as poor as I to seek a woman so rich as her- self; " — but she was not thinking that at all as she swept on in her sables, with her delicate cheeks, fair as the lovely Niphetos rose, against the darkness of the fur. That immortality which she had been doubt- ing in the morning, did not seem so absurdly 222 IN A WINTER CITY. impossible here. There was religion in the place, a different one to what she had known kneeling at the messe cles i:)aresseiix in the Madeleine ; the sort of religion that a woman only becomes aware of when she loves. She started and seemed to wake from a dream when Princess Olga suggested that it was time to go ; Princess Olga was a person of innumer- able engagements, who was alwaj^s racing after half an hour without ever catching it, like the Minister-Duke of Newcastle, and like ninety-nine ]3eople out of every hundred in the nineteenth centuiy. There was some bric-a-brac the Prin- cess wanted somebody to cheapen- for her; she bade him come and do it ; he complied will- iiigi}' enough. They went all thi-ee to that bric- a-brac shop, and thence to another, and 3'et another. Then Princess Olga, who was used to a more brilliant part than that of the ** terza incommoda," left them to themselves over the faience and marqueterie. Lady Hilda who, despite all her fashion, liked walking like every healthy Avoman, dismissed her horses, and walked the length of the river-street, IN A WINTER CITY. 223 lie with lier. People meeting them hegan to make conjectures, and hets, harder than ever ; and Italian ladies, looking out of their carriage win- dows, wondered for the five -millionth time at the reedom of English women — as indeed Italian ladies have good cause to do in far more repre- hensible liberties. They walked down to the piazzone and back again. It was growing dusk. She went home to her hotel, and let him enter with her, and had some tea by the firelight ; all the while he made love to her with eyes arid gesture and word, as only an Italian can, and she avoided exphcit declaration of it, and direct need to re^^ly to it, with all the consummate tact that ten years' prac- tice in such positions had polished in her. It was a charming pastime — were it nothing more. It was quite a pity when Madame Mila entered unsuspecting, and full of new wrongs in the matter of the Muscadins and fresh gos- sip concerning some forty peoj)le's marriages, divorces, debts, ignominies, and infamies. It is fortunate that there are so many wicked people in Society, for if there were not, what would the 224 IN A WINTER CITY. good i^eople have to talk about ? they would die of paralysis of the tongue. "You will not leave us for Paris, yet?" he murmm-ed as he rose, with a sigh, only heard by her ear. She smiled, and balanced a Devouiensis tea- rose idly in her hands. " Not just j-et, if your weather prove better." He drew the tea-rose away from her fingers unseen even by the quick marmoset eyes of little Madame Mila, who as it chanced was busied making herself a cup of tea. She let it go. *' You should have seen all the men looking after that horrible Lea," said Madame Mila, drinking her compound of cream and sugar, as the door closed on him. " They have eyes for nothing else, I do think; and only fancy her having the very suite above mine — it is atrocious ! They say the things at her sale fetched fabulous sums. Little pomatum and rouge pots, five hun- dred francs each ! They say she has fixed her mind on young Sant' Andrea here ; I suppose she has heard he is enormously rich. Oh, did you know Gwendolen Doncaster has come ? She has IN A WINTER CITY. 225 lost all lier money at Monte Carlo, and she lias dyed her hair a nice straw colour ; she looks fif- teen years younger, I do assure you. Don is shooting in Dalmatia — of course she abuses him — poor old Don ! I wonder ho-w we should have got on if he liad married me, as he wanted. Gwen told me Lord Derb^'shire has run off with Mrs. "NVheelskaitte — what he can see in her ! And those open scandals are so stupid, where is the use of them ? Surely you can do what you like without calling all the world in to see you doing it. "When a woman has an easy husband she never need compromise herself, awd Wheelskaitte cer- tainty always was that. Oh, you never would know them, I remember, because they were new people ; she was an odious creature and very ugly, but they gave very good parties in London, and their cottage was as nice a one as you could go to for Ascot. You used to like little Wroxetei*, did not you ? he was such a pretty boy — he has just left Eton, and he is wild to marry a girl out of a music-hall, so Gwen says. Those creatures get all the good marriages nowadays : — and two hun- dred debutantes waiting to be presented at the Q 226 IN A WINTER CITY. Drawing-rooni this month ! Have yon seen the new book ' Confessions d'un Feu Follet ' ? Mau- rice has just brought it to me. It is rivalling Jenny Lea, and they say it is worse — quite un- mentionable — everybody is talliing about it. It was out last week, and they have sold five edi- tions. The man called Bistrim in it is Bismarck. No; I don't know that it is witty. I don't think things are wittj"" nowadays. It is horrible and infecte — but you can't put it down till you've done it. Old Lady Mauleverer is dying at the Pace hotel here — of undigested scandal, Feather- leigli says, but I believe it's gastritis — what a nasty old wom.an she has always been. I have just left a card with inquiries and regrets ; I do hope she won't get better. I won ever so much at play last night. I forgot to tell you so : I bought that rocaille necklace on the Jewellers' Bridge ; it was only six thousand francs, and it really did belong to the Comtesse d'Alban3% It's very pretty too " So Madame Mila discoursed, greatly to her own satisfaction. She loved so much to hear her own tongue, that she always chose the stupidest IN A WINTER CITY. 227 and silliest of her lovers for her chief favoiu's — a clever man had always ideas of his own, and was sure to want to express them sometime or another. All she desired were listeners and echoes. Dis- cussion may be the salt of life to a few, but listeners and echoes are the bonbons and cigarettes that no woman can do without. The Lady Hilda sitting looking into the fire, with her eyes nearly closed, murmured yes, and no, and indeed, in the proper places, and let her run on, hearing not one word. Those fingers which had entangled themselves so softly with her own with- drawing the tea-rose, had left a magnetic thrill upon her — a dreamy, lulling pleasure. That evening the good Hubert received a second telegram contradicting the first, which had announced his mistress's return, and putting off that return indefinitely. The good Hubert, who was driving her best horses, drinking her best wines, drawing large cheques for accounts never examined, and generally enjoying his winter, was much relieved, and hastened to communicate the happy change to Monsieur Camille Odissot, whom the first telegram had also cast into great conster- ^ 2 228 IN A WINTER CITY. nation ; since that clever but idle young gentleman, having been pre-paid half the sum agreed on for the fresco-painting, had been spending it jo3'Ously after the tastes of 3'oung artists, assisted by a pretty brown actress of the Folies Marigny, and had not at that moment even begun to touch the walls and the ceiling of the ball-room con- fided to his genius. " But j'ou had better begin, though she is not coming back," said the good Hubert, surveying the blank waste of prepared plaster. " Miladi is not often out of temper, but when she is, ouf ! I would as soon serve a Paissian. Better begin ; paint 3'our best, because she knows — Miladi knows, and she is hard to please in those things. Not but what I dare sa}', as soon as you have done it all, she will take it into her head that it looks too cold, or looks too warm, or will not compose well, or something or other, and will cover it all up with silk and satin. But that will not matter to you." *' Not at all," said Monsieur Camllle, who, though lie liad been a pupil of Flandrin, had learned nothing of that true master's conscieu- IN A WINTER CITY. 229 tiousness in art, but was a clever young man of a new generation, who drew beautifull}', as meclia- nicall}' as a tailor stitches beautifull}', and was of the very wise opinion that money was every- thing. CHAPTEE VIII. The Posticlie ball came off, and was a brilliant success. Madame Mila announced the next morning wlien she got up that she had never enjoyed anything better — not even at the Tuil- eries. "And the hostess ?" said Lad}- Hilda. " I didn't even see her, thank goodness," said Madame Mila, frankly. " I went late, you know, and she'd been standing at the door four hom's, and had got tired, and had gone off duty into the crowd somewhere. Of course it wasn't ni}' busi- ness to go and look for her." " Of course not, but you brought off your cotillon things ? " IN A WINTER CITY. 231 *' Yes. There tliey are," said Madame Mila, un- conscious of any satii'e. " I never saw sncli luxe — no, not even in the dear ohl Emperor's time — the things everj-body got must have cost hu;idreds of thousands of francs. Certainl}' little Piclde managed it beautifully. He ordered the ;T^hole affair, you know." " Little Dickie, or anybody else, could float Medea herself in society if she would brew cotillon toys of a new sort in her cauldron," said the Lad}^ Hilda. "Medea?" said Madame Mila, who knew about her because she had seen Eistori so often. ** Poor thing ! it was that horrid Jason that deserved to be put out of society, only men never do get put out of it for anything they do ; I don't know how it is — we cut no end of women, but we never cut a man. Well, I assure you, my dear, the ball was charming — charming, though you do look so contemptuous. We had all our own people, and saw nobody else, all night. I don't think I need bow to the woman, do you ? I'm not supposed to have seen her, though I do know her b}'' sight, a little podgy sunburnt-looking 232 IN A WIN TEH CITY. fat creature with liveries for all the world like what the sheriffs have in England at assize time. No ; I'm sure I needn't how to her. I told Dickie beforehand I shouldn't." " No doubt Dickie was delighted to have j'ou on any terms." " Of course ; and I'll send a card to-day," said Madame Mila, with the magnanimous air of one who does a very noble thing. From that time thenceforward she would forget the Joshua E. Postiches and everything concern- ing them as absolutely as if she had never heard anything about them ; the woman's second ball, if she gave one, would be nothing new, and no sort of fun whatever. ** You're always at me about jNIaurice," she said, pursuing her own ideas, " Look at Olga with Carlo Maremma ! — she did make him go last night, and he was the only Italian there. You talk of Maurice — Olga is twice as careless as I am " *' Olga is my friend; don't discuss her, please." " Oh, tliat's very fine ! — when you are always finding fault Avith me about Maurice ! " IN A WINTER CITY. 233 " I should not let an}' third person blame 3'ou." "You arc very strange, Hilda," said Madame Mila, eyeing her with a curious wonder, and ruffling herself up in her embroidered pink cashmere dressing-gown, as if she were a little bird in the heart of a big rose. " Why should you defend people behind their back ? No- body ever does. We all say horrible things of one another; but we don't mean half of them, so what does it matter ? I don't blame Olga, not in the least ; Schouvaloff is a brute, and, besides, he knows it very well, and he doesn't mind a bit ; indeed, of course he's glad enough " "I do blame Olga ; but I can't see how ijou can," said her cousin, coldly. Madame JMila ruffled herself more, looking more and more like a little angry bird in the middle of a pink rose. " I ? Pray what can anybody say of me ? Spiridion is always with me half the year at least. Spiridion is extremely fond of JMaurice, so are all the children. He's at another hotel, right at the other end of the place ; really I can't see why 234 IN A WINTER CITY. I must rush out of a town because a friend happens to come into it also " " My dear Mila, pray don't talk that nonsense to me," said her cousin, serenely. " I daresay ten jTars hence you will marry your little Lili to M. des Gommeux; people do do that sort of thing, though they find fault with the plots of the old Greek plays. I suppose it ''saves society; " at least, it saves appearances. Olga is imprudent, I know, and wrong; but, at least she has the courage of her opinions ; she does not talk all that pusillanimous prurient absurdity about * friendship.' " " Nobody can understand j^ou, Hilda ; and I don't know what you mean about Greek plays," muttered Madame Mila. " Everybody lives in the same way : you talk as if it were only me ! Spii-idion never says a word to me; what business have you?" " None in the least, dear ; only you will bring up the subject — Qui s'excuse s'accuse. That is all. You are not cominc; out tliis mornino"? Au revoir then ; I am going to see a newly- found San Cipriano il Mngo outside the gates ; IN A WINTER CITY. 235 they think it is by II Moretto. The face and dress are Venetian, they say ; hut you care no- thing about all that, do j'ou ? " *' Nothing," said Madame Mila, with a yawn. ** I suppose if it take your fancy you'll be buying the whole church with it in, if you can't get it any other way. I wish I'd your money, I wouldn't waste it on old pictures, that only make a room dark ; and the kind of light they want is horribly unbecoming to people." " I promise j^oul shall not hang an altar-piece in a room," said the Lady Hilda. *'I leave that for the heretics and the bourgeoisie. Good-bye, my dear." *' Who's going with you ? " cried Madame Mila, after her : Lady Hilda hesitated a moment. " Nina is, and the French artist who has dis- covered the Moretto, and M. della Eocca." Madame Mila laughed, and took up a little mirror to see if all the colour on her face were quite right. One horrible never-to-be-forgotten day — one eyebrow had been higher than the other. Lady Hilda, descending the hotel staircase, 236 IN A WINTER CITY. met the faithful Maurice ascending. That slender aud indefatigable leader of cotillons swept his hat to the ground, twisted the waxed ends of his small moustache, and murmured that he was about to inquire of the servants if Madame la Comtesse were " tout-a-fait remise apres ses fatigues incroj-ables." Lady Hilda, whom he feared very greatly, passed him with a chilly salutation, and he went on up the stairs, and in two minutes' lime was assuring Madame Mila that she was " fraiche comme la rosee du matin," which did credit to his ready chivalry of comphments, since he was aware of all the mysteries of those bright cheeks and that small pomegranate-like mouth, and had even once or twice before great balls, given an artistic touch or two to their completion, having Graduated with much skill and success in such accomplishments under the tuition of Mademoi- selle Rose The, and La Petite Boulotte. The San Cipriano was to be found in a church some five miles out of the city ; a lonely church set high on a fragrant hill-side, with sheep amongst the olive bouglis, and the ox-plough under the IN A WINTER CITY. 237 vines that were all about it, and liigli hedges of wild roses and thickets of arbutus rambling around its old walled grave3'ard. The paths close round it were too steep for the horses, and the last half mile had to be climbed on foot. It was one of those spring days which often fall in February ; the ground was blue with violets, and the grass golden with crocus and hepatica ; there were butterflies and bees on the air ; the mavis and blackbird were singing. The San Cipriano hung over a side altar in the dark, desolate, grand old church, where no worshipper ever came except a tired peasant, or a shepherd sheltering from a storm. Uella Rocca pulled aside the moth-eaten cur- tains from the adjacent window, and let the sun- shine in. Some little children were sitting on the altar-steps stringing daisies and berries ; the light made a halo about their heads ; the deep Venetian colours of the forgotten picture glanced like jewels through the film of the dust of ages. Its theme was the martyrdom of the jNIagician and of S, Justina ; beneath were the crowds of 238 IN A WINTER CITY. Nicomedia and the guards of Diocletian, above were the heavens opened and the hosts of waiting angels. It was a great theme greatly treated by the great Brescian who, although the pupil of Titian and the rival of Veronese is so little known, save in the cities that lie betwixt the Dolomites and the Apennmes. " It is one of the most beautiful legends that we have, to my thinking," said Delia Eocca, when they had studied it minutely and in all lights. " It has been very seldom selected by painters for treatment ; one wonders why ; perhaps be- cause there is too much human passion in it for a sacred subject." ** Yes," said Lady Hilda, dreamily. " One can never divest oneself of the idea that S. Jus- tina loved him with an earthly love." " Oh, Hilda ! how pagan of you," said the Marchesa del Trasimene, a little aghast. " Not at all. Why should we doubt it ? " said Delia Ptocca, quickly. "Why should we deny that a pure love would have power against the powers of the world ? " Lady Hilda looked at him, and a gi-eat softness IN A WINTER CITY. 239 came into lier face ; then she stoox^ecl to the little children playing with the berries on the altar- steps, and put some money in their little brown hands. "It is a very fine picture,'^ she said, after a moment's pause. "I do not thinli I have ever seen brown and gold and crimson so beautifully managed, and fused in so deep a glo-^ of colour save in Palma Yecchio's S. Barbara— you re- member — in S. Maria Formosa in Vemce ?" "The portrait of Violante Palma- -yes. But this subject has a deeper and warmer interest. S. Barbara with her tower and her oannon is too strong to touch one very much. One cannot tlunk that she ever suffered." " Yet S. Barbara has a very wide popularity, if one may use the word to a saint." " All symbols of strength have ; the i)eople are weak; they love what will help them. It is very singular what deep root and vast fame one saint has, and how obscure remains another ; yei both equal in holiness and life, and courage of death. Perhaps the old painters have done it by the fi'e- quency of their choice of certain themes." 240 IN A WINTER CITY. " Oh, no," said Lad}- Hilda ; " be sure the painters rather followed the public preference than directed it. Poets lead ; painters only mirror. I like this San Cipriano very much. They did not say too much of it. It is left to dust and damp. Could I buy it do you think ? " *' I dare say, — I ^Yill inquire for you to-morrow. We sell anything noAV. "When the public debt is a little heavier, and the salt tax is protested against, we shall sell the Transfiguration — why not ? — we have a copy at S. Peter's. Indeed, why keep the S. Cecilia doing nothing in a dark old city like Bologna, when its sale with a few others might make a minister or a senator well off for life ? " " Do not be so bitter, Paolo," said the Mar- chesa Nina, *'you miglit have been a minister yourself" "And rebuilt Palestrina out of my commission on the tax on cabbages ! Yes, I have lost my opportunities." The Lad}' Hilda was gazing at the clouds of angels in the picture, who bore aloft the mart3Ted souls in their innnortal union ; and from them JiV A WINTER CITY. 241 she glanced at the little fair wondering faces of the peasant children. She had never thought about children ever in any way, save as little figures that composed well in Stothard's draw- ings, in Sir Joshua's pictures, in Correggio's frescoes. Now, for a second, the thought glanced through her that women were happy who had those tender soft ties with the future of the world. What future had she ? — You cannot make a future out of diamonds, china, and M. Worth. ** You really wish to buy the San Cipriano ? " he asked her, as they passed over the worn, damp pavement towards the sunlight of the opon door. " Yes — you seem to think it sacrilege ? " ** No ; I think the moral decadence of feeling which makes it possible for my nation to sell such things is a sacrilege against our past, and a violation of the rights of our posterity ; — but that is another matter, and no fault of yours. What will you do with it when you have it ? " ** I will put it in my oratory in Paris." The answer jarred on him; j-et there was nC oUier which he could have expected. 242 IN A WINTER CITY. " How naturally you think of buying all you see ! " he said, a little impatiently. " I suppose that power of acquisition — that wand of posses- sion — is very dear to you." " What do you mean ? I do not know — it is a habit. Yes ; I suppose one likes it." *'No doubt. Your riches are to you as his magic was to San Cipriano yonder : the wil- lingest of slaves." " "What !— an evil spirit then ? " " Not necessarily. But " " But what ? " "A despot, though a slave. One who holds your soul ; as the powers of darkness held his, until a great and spii'itual love set him free." They were passing out of the open doorway into the calm golden light of the passing day. Through the fine tracery of the oHve-boughs the beautiful valley shone like a summer sea. Before them, above tlie southern mountains, the sun was going down. Her eyes grew dim for a moment as she looked. His hand had closed on hers ; she let it lie within his clasp ; it was the first gesture of tenderness she had ever allowed IN A WINTER CITY. 243 to liim. Then at a sudden recollection she with- drew it, and she smiled with her old serene indif- ference. " You loill talk to me in unknown tongues ! S. Justina was a holy woman ; I am not. I am not sure that I ever did any unselfish thing in all my life. How many violets there are ; — gather me some." The others drew near ; he left her and gathered the violets. They were countless ; the old church was left alone to perish ; no foot of priest or wor- shipper now ever trod upon their purple glories. She leaned over the low wall of tlie grave -yard, and watched the setting sun. She felt that her eyes were full of tears. *' If I had met him earlier " she thought. They walked down through the olive thickets, along the grassy slopes of the hill, to the carriage, and drove home in the now waning light. She was capricious, contemptuous, ironical, arrogant, in everything she said, lyiug hack with the furs covering her from the chill evening winds. r2 244 IN A WINTER CITY. *' Does going to a clinvcli ahvay make you so caustic, cara mia ? " said the Marchesa Nina. Delia Piocca was veiy silent. The French artist kept up the ball of talk with her and the lovely Marchesa, and plaj^ed the gay game well. The sun sank quite ; the brief twilight came ; then darkness ; the horses took them dcmi through the walled lanes and the rose hedges into the narrow streets, where here and there the lamps were twinkling, and the glow of the wood fires shone through the grated casements. The carriage paused first at the Hotel Murat. " I shall see you to-night at Princess Fiirsten- berg's, Hilda, of course ? " said the Marchesa. *' Oh, yes," said the Lady Hilda as she descen- ded, drawing her sables closer around her. " You will be there, I suppose?" she added, with a little change of her voice, to Delia Eocca, as he held his arm for her to alight. He looked straight down into her eyes. " T think not," he said, simply. "Good night, Madame." He stood with his head uncovered, whilst she went up the steps of the hotel ; then, as the door IN A WINTER CITY. 245 closed on her, he -walked away to his own old house. Lady Hilda went up to her own rooms ; she had a knot of violets with her. Before she put tlieni in water she touched them with her lips — as any girl of sixteen or any peasant Gretcheu might have done. That night at the Princess Fiirstenherg's — one of the pleasantest houses of the winter city — men and women hoth said to one another that they had never seen her looking more beautiful, or more magnificent in the hlaze of her jewels, but they found her colder, and more difficult to converse with than ever, and were more than ever hope- lessly impressed with the sense of their own abso- lute nullitv in her eyes. He was not there. She stayed but a brief time ; long enough to chill everv one there like ice, which was the effect she always produced in society, when it was so unhappy as nut t(5 please her ; then, having frozen it, she left it, — the ladies who remained breathing freer when her delicate loveliness and her mighty emorabls had ceased to ©utshine 246 IN A WINTER CITY. tliem. Slie sank back in her carriage with a great sigh. The homeward streets led past the palace of the Delia Rocca. She let the v/indow down, and looked outward as she passed it. She saw a single casement alone lighted in the great black mass of frowning stone, with its machicolated walls and iron stanchions. It was above the en- trance ; she knew it was his favourite room ; where his books were, and his old bronzes, and his favourite weapons. Her eyes filled with tears again as she looked U]) at the solitary light. She felt for the little cluster of violets that she had fastened under the great emeralds in her bosom, — his hand had gathered them. " If anyone had told me I would care ! " she thought to herself. The tears on her lashes stole slowly down, and dimmed the emeralds and refreshed the violets. She was the most heartless creature in the world; the coldest and most self-engrossed of women, her friends and acquaintances were saying after her departure, iu the dvawinain. " Who would ever have helieved that Miladi was a woman to heggar herself and play the romance of the * world lost for love ? ' If I had only imagined — if I had only dreamed ! I wall never propose a marriage to any living being again ; never." *' You have nothing to be so remorseful about, Due," said Lord Clairvaux, with a sigh, himself utterly exhausted by all the law work that he had been obliged to go through. "It is very funny certainly — she of all women in the world ! But they are happy enough, and he really is the only Hving creature that ever could manage her. If anybody had ever told me that any man would change Hilda like that ! " " Happy ! " echoed M. de St. Louis, with his delicate and incredulous smile. He was a man who had no delusions ; he was perfectly aware that there were no marriages that were happy ; some were calm, this was the uttermost, and 3S4 IX A WINTER CITY. to remain calm required an immense income ; money alone was harmon}'. Lord Clairvaux liglited a very big cigar, and grumbled that it had been horrible to have to leave England in the Epsom month, but that he thanked goodness that it was the last of her caprices that he would be worried with ; and he hoped that this Italian would like them when he had had a year or two of them. " I don't know, though, but what it is the only sensible caprice she ever did have in her life; eh?" he added; ''except buying Escargot and giving him to me after the races — you remem- ber ? — Hang it, I've never seen such a Chantilly before or since as that was ! " *'We never do see such a race as the one that wc happen to win," murmured M. de St. Louis. " Of course it's an awful cropper to take, and all that ; but I'm not sure but what she's done a wise thing, though all the women are howling at her like mad," continued Lord Clairvaux ; " a woman can't live for ever on dtifons, you see." IN A WINTER CITY. 385 " Most women can — admirably. They buy at eighty as much white hair, the coiffeurs tell me, as they buy blonde or black at twenty." " Ah, but they can't, if they have a bit of heart or mind in them. Hilda has both." ** The case is so rare I could not prescribe for it — let us hope Miladi's own prescription will suit her," said the Due, whose serene good- humour was still slightly ruffled. "Well, she always was all extremes and con- traries," said Lord Clairvaux. " You never could say one minute what she wouldn't do the next. By George ! you know there is nothing too odd for her to go in for ; I should not wonder an atom if when we come here two or three years hence, we find her worshipping a cmiy Paohno, seeing to the silkworms, and studying wine-making : she's really tried ever- thing else, you know." " Everything except happiness ? Well, very few of us get any chance of trying that, or would appreciate it if we did get it. Happi- ness," pui'sued the Due pensively, '* must, after 386 IN A WINTER CITY. all, be almost as monotonous as discontent — when one is used to it. It is comforting to think so ; for there is very little of it. I cannot realize Miladi amongst the babies and the wine- presses ; but you may be right." " Well, you know she's tried everything else," repeated Lord CJairvaux. "It will be like Julius Csesar and his cabbage-garden." "You mean Diocletian," said the Due. "Do you leave to-night ? We may as weU go as far as Paris together.' And he turned back into the hotel to bid farewell to Madame Mila. Madame Mila, — who had made the religious and civil ceremonies gorgeous in the last new anomalous anachronisms, with a classic and clin IV INDUS, PICCADILLY. Cruikshank (George): The Comic Almanack. Complete in Two Series : The First from 1835 to 1843 ; the Second from 1S44 to 1853. A Gathering of the Best Humour of Thackeray, Hood, Mav- HEW, Albert Smith, A'Beckett, Robert Brough, &c. 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